VLVL2 The Failure of Analysis

[Terrance]

http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~campber/randcogrev.html
Bandwraith at aol.com wrote:
> 
> It's pretty clear no matter what one's overall impression
> of events that occurred, or climaxed, in "the sixties" that
> it was a watershed- long time coming, long time gone. It
> was not just political and social, of course, but epistem-
> ological, cutting across all areas of culture, including the
> scientific ways of knowing.
> 
> This change was so extensive that it outstripped even the
> ways of measuring and describing change itself and new
> methods of gauging "where we are" at any given moment
> were required. The old perspectives seemed to fail. A good
> example of that would be the publication of GR, which none
> the characters in the present novel seem lucky enough to
> have stumbled upon, although the Pisk sisters probably at
> least glanced at it, after the Oregon commune fizzled.
> 
> Kuhn's criteria for detecting a "Scientific Revolution," in
> retrospect, seems also to have been inadequate to detect
> and/or classify, i.e., analyze the magnitude of change. There
> seemed to have been a failure of objectivity, if that can be
> considered as consenually agreed upon ways of knowing.
> 
> During such periods, when Objectivity itself fails, the older
> dispensations, dwarfed by the magnitude of what they are
> in the midst of, may, paradoxically, fail to register, or, more
> likely, decide that what is happening is only a minor ripple.
> By Kuhn's criteria, the much popularized "new science" of chaos
> and complexity, might be dismissed as a "false revolution."
> 
> The theme of "false revolution" I think, is an important one in
> Vineland, but especially in the context of older perspectives
> being unable to cope with the magnitude of change of which they
> themselves are a part.
> 
> respectfully