Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Old Paradigm Based on "What Is" Metaphysics

Substance Metaphysics Characteristics (Old Paradigm)

• Discrete individuality
• Separateness
• Fixity of nature
• Passivity (being acted upon)
• Classificatory stability

Substance (Metaphysics) Required
• Determinism
• Cause/effect
• Passive Things
• A thing world
• A fixed thing world
• A study of only “what is”
• It makes “what is” permanent

The Old Material World View

Psychologist Eleanor Rosch characterized perception based on this form of knowledge as follows:
"In the analytic picture offered by the cognitive sciences, the world consists of separate objects and states of affairs, the human mind is a determinate machine which, in order to know, isolates and identifies those objects and events, finds the simplest possible predictive contingencies between them, stores the results through time in memory, relates the items in memory to each other such that they form a coherent but indirect representation of the world and oneself, and retrieves those representations in order to fulfill the only originating value, which is to survive and reproduce in an evolutionarily successful manner”

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