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Does Wikipedia provide false authority to our sound-bite soc

 
 
coberst
 
Reply Mon 16 Oct, 2006 04:38 am
Does Wikipedia provide false authority to our sound-bite society?

The following is a paragraph from a Wikipedia entry for Thomas Kuhn's book titled "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions".

Quote:
"The changes that occur in politics, society and business are often expressed in Kuhnian terms, however poor their parallel with the practice of science may seem to scientists and historians of science. The terms "paradigm" and "paradigm shift" have become such notorious clichés and buzzwords that they are viewed in many circles as being effectively devoid of content and their use in these contexts rarely has any firm foundation in Kuhn's original definitions."

This paragraph gives us some insight into the dangers inherent in our sound-bite, bumper-sticker society, in which many people gain a small fragment of knowledge and from this fragment are deluded into thinking that they comprehend very complex ideas.

I am not much of a user of Wikipedia and thus have little knowledge upon which I can answer my own question.
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fresco
 
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Reply Mon 16 Oct, 2006 07:15 am
Quote:
The terms "paradigm" and "paradigm shift" have become such notorious clichés and buzzwords that they are viewed in many circles as being effectively devoid of content and their use in these contexts rarely has any firm foundation in Kuhn's original definitions."


....yet you applaud Lakoff's analysis of communication "by metaphor" ! You can't have it both ways !
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coberst
 
  1  
Reply Mon 16 Oct, 2006 09:17 am
fresco wrote:
Quote:
The terms "paradigm" and "paradigm shift" have become such notorious clichés and buzzwords that they are viewed in many circles as being effectively devoid of content and their use in these contexts rarely has any firm foundation in Kuhn's original definitions."


....yet you applaud Lakoff's analysis of communication "by metaphor" ! You can't have it both ways !


If you were to study Lakoff's book on 'conceptual metaphor' you would comprehend the irony in that statement.
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Shapeless
 
  1  
Reply Mon 16 Oct, 2006 05:35 pm
Re: Does Wikipedia provide false authority to our sound-bite
coberst wrote:
Does Wikipedia provide false authority to our sound-bite society?


It might, but this phenomenon precedes Wikipedia by a long shot. Sound-bytes can be gotten anywhere, of course, including A2K. Wikipedia might foster the reliance on sound-bytes, but even then it depends on the entry. A relatively recent study by Nature magazine showed the accuracy of certain scientific entries on Wikpedia to be not significantly different from the Encyclopaedia britannica (who of course hotly contested the study).
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