Horizontal disciplines and 'paradigm shifts'

A thought:

It is precisely the shift from one vocabulary to another (within a horizontal discipline) that is involved in fundamental epistemological transformations. eg from empiricist to interpretative to critical to postie, etc. Or through the Women's ways of knowing. Or Piaget. Or any other dialectical developmental process of change.

Seems Bernstein may have used Rorty but simply turned him upside down, reinstalling a Francophile rationalism as the true goal of knowledge, universities, education, you name it. BTW quite a contrast with Halliday, who despite his commitment to 'system', is much more frank about the limits of inward-looking theory-construction and system building, and open to the messiness of instantial reality. Of course, for Halliday they constitute a continuum so there is no need to choose one over the other end of the spectrum.

Vertical disciplines are (I assume) just a continuum - like the criterion referenced approach. (Interesting that this is not my understanding of say Maths - which involved 'jumps', 'discontinuites' as you move from one level to another. Maybe this is why B places it as a horizontal discipline.)

Need to check:

- Engestrom

- Vygotsky

- re-look at Rorty

Reasoning without universals

Halliday has a really nice endnote to his introduction to his Collected Works (Vol 1, p 14) in which he adduces his grandmother who 'spoke unself-consciously in proverbs'. He then characterises a proverb as:

a theory of experience, but ... a commonsense theory, not a designed theory, and so construed in commonsense grammar, as one of a class of instances rather than a higher order abstraction.

To follow through on this would involve studying the place, uses and pedagogies of sententia in ancient rhetoric:

The sententia is an 'infinite' (i.e. not restricted to one individual case) idea, formulated in a sentence as proof or as ornatus. ... The infinite character and demonstrative function of the sententia are due to the fact that it is regarded, in the social milieu of its range of validity and application, as a piece of wisdom with the same authority as a legal judgement or written law, applicable to many concrete ("finite") cases. Sententia lay claim to validity, partly as assessments of situations, partly as statements of duty standards, which may occur as commands or as prohibitions. (Lausberg 388)

Halliday's invented 'snatch of dialogue' conforms perfectly to this schema: his grandmother is arguing that Harry (presumably a suitor) is so bad that Maggie will not be able to change him.

The best place to study this in detail, apart from rhetoric, would be in Common Law and Theology. The reasoning of both depends on invoking and applying 'proverbs' from authoritative texts - Roman law, precedents, the gospels and other church authorities. And of course, Gadamer is precisely the one who has tried to explain the rationality of this form of reasoning, abstraction and application. He calls it hermeneutics. Others call it 'case-based reasoning', 'reflective judgement' (Kant).