Tautology to nowhere?

Continuing our IPS discussion the following is in response to Joe's recent post.

Let me see if I follow your tautology. The axiom is that we need a meta-paradigm to adjudicate between possibly incommensurate paradigms. And yet there is no way to falsify meta-paradigms so we must return to even those being incommensurate? Please clarify if I have this wrong.

As to your criticism of Edwards, I have yet to carefully read that article. I'll respond to your specific concern after so doing. For now I can say that I’ve made a direct connection between Edwards lenses and image schema and the fit is quite snug. While he hasn’t done so directly he did note in that post “these lens categories tap into some basic relationships that exist in the human experience of reality.” If we ground his lenses with L&J’s non-falsified research we have some validating parameters. I’d also say that he has made meta-theory the work of his Ph.D. dissertation, and it is his continuing project with thousands of hours of research into an apparently quite deep and communally validated branch of study. This is not to say he’s correct on all counts but that he is more likely to have a better handle on the topic.


As for Balder's linked Bryant post, he's again using Spenser-Brown's Laws of Form as he did in TDOO. Which I might add is based on non-falsified math and logic not as tautological systems but again grounded in image schema. Bryant starts with the transcendental deduction on the very conditions for truth claims. Then he proceeds to frames, which always leave something out and a point Joe also makes. However in another post Bryant makes clear that we must use a second-order observation, or a meta-theory on other philosophical frames, to compare them. Hence his Borromean critical theory. And by comparing the frames with and against each other this provides a more comprehensive meta-frame to adjudicate. In that sense it’s very much like IT. And of course even a meta-theory or frame leaves something out, so we need a community of meta-frames to compare to each other, etc. ad infinitum. And of course it helps to have some (meta)systemic way to go about falsifying those ongoing debates. In that regard I’d again say Edwards is far ahead of IT and even CR, OOO and SR. But the latter can also help to make Edwards’ work better and more falsifiable.

And this is of course one of the functions of our forum, to cross-check and reference the various paradigms to get a continually better and progressing IT now and forever, Amen!

I'm also reminded of a discussion on a Ph.D. dissertation on general and restricted economy that begins at this post and continues on that page and the next. It too grants that we must always operate within a restricted economy or framed paradigm. But it also takes into account the excess or unmarked space, and makes some transcendental deductions about what is might be like in order to allow a paradigm or formatted space to even arise. We've also explored that quite a bit in a number of threads and its only falsibility is in the deduction, which is itself based on, you guessed it, falsifiable image schema.