None of the four respondents called attention to the things that I thought were most important.

That’s a shame

In part 2, page 47 first paragraph, for instance, Duffy says “Paradigms, Kuhn maintains, are embraced or rejected for non-scientific reasons ranging from personal idiosyncracies to social reasons such as reputation or national prestige.” He doesn’t tell you that the support for this statement comes from a single sentence on page 153 of the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and that sentence, far from representing Kuhn’s overall view, completely overlooks Kuhn’s detailed discussion of far more important values that guide paradigm choice, values I discussed at length in essays that Duffy lists in his biolography. See my “Paradigms Crossed” essay in RBBM 7/2, for instance. This key representation is thus neither accurate, nor ideologically innocent.

And look at the story from Professor Fish that Duffy employs as his interpretive key, his paradigm-defining metaphor, showing what historicity debates are most like. Change it slightly. Instead of letting the students interpret the list of names as a poem, “inventing evidence” in support of their socially defined approach, suppose Professor Fish has said, “Is this a Shakespearean sonnet?” Would the students be inventing and concluding in the same way? And are there questions in Book of Mormon studies that resemble this changed situation? (Yes! Thousands!) So could not we liken the new situation to Book of Mormon debates? Can we so then so easily follow Duffy in labeling all the evidence as “invented?” Or suppose that one English student had also taken Linguistics courses, and interupted the misguided invention of evidence for a poetic reading, and said, “Let’s compare the names with Professor Fish’s linguistics syllabus.” What effect would that comparison have on their group committment to reading the names as a poem?

I can do the same kinds of thing with the “likening” that Duffy takes from Foucault’s Pendulum, the story of the ambiguous fragmentary parchment. He uses the misrepresentation of Kuhn and then his key metaphors to slant everything away from any discussion, definition, or appreciation of the most rational values applied in paradigm choice, those which are not socially constructed, not self-referential, group-defined criteria. I’ve long been fascinated that Alma 32 offers equivalents to Kuhn’s key values for paradigm choice.

None of the four Sunstone commentators analyzed the cartography and its implications. All the responses, however interesting and thoughtful, take Duffy’s map for granted as given, rather than seeing it as constructed for a specific purpose, by specific methods, toward a specific ideological end.

FWIW

Kevin Christensen
Bethel Park, PA

All of the heavy lifting in the article depends on the two metaphors that Duffy offers as interpretive guides to his map. That is, the Stanley Fish story about English students trying to interpret a list of linguist’s names a a poem. If you play around just a little with that metaphor, it’s easy to change the overall cartography a great deal. Because slight variations change so much, comparison also exposes the implications of the his choice. The second metaphor he uses revolves around a subplot of Foucault’s Pendulum, a husband and wife interpreting a fragmentary parchment in unresolvable ways. I notice that Nibely’s discussion of the best method for dealing with ancient documents says that the “closest we can come to certainty is when we have a long historical document,” which means that metaphor that Duffy follows, involving fragment, is really inappropriate.

Secondly, while he invokes Kuhn and a few of the non-scientific reasons for paradigm debate (social and personal ones), he completely neglects the other far more significant values, such as accuracy of key predictions, comprehensiveness, coherence, fruitfulness, simplicity, aesthetics, and future promise. He does this despite citing a long article of mine on that specific topic (Paradigms Crossed in RBBM 7/2). It happens that neglecting the compass, the stronger values available for paradigm choice, serves the agenda of the article.

Finally, I’d suggest the Parry Scheme for Cognitive and Ethical Growth as a Legend, a guide for entering relativistic territories.

I wrote a detailed paper on the topic, but apparently Sunstone would rather have readers saying “If this is correct, what meaning does my life have?” than to publishing something critical of a major effort by one of their favorite authors. And perhaps, they like his not-so mysterious agenda, his argument that if the scholarship issues are unresolvable, why not just make your decisions based on who you want to hang around with.

Kevin Christensen
Pittsburgh, PA