The Competitiveness of Nations

in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy

November  2002

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Harry Hillman Chartrand

Thomas Kuhn’s “Pelican Brief”

1. Introduction

a) Psychic Alchemy

1.01        The “Pelican Brief” in the title refers not to the 1993 film starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington (Pakula 1993) but to the alembic or vessel of distillation used by medieval alchemists.  Within its confines the Magnus Opus was conducted: the Philosopher’s Stone was conjured: a metaphor for transmutation of base metal into gold; psychologically, an archetypal image of wholeness (Sharpe 1991).  Matter was transformed from one state and/or substance to another and, according to some, God, trapped in Matter at the moment of Creation, was liberated (Filoramo 1990).  With the resulting Stone, the Alchemist, and his Kabbalist cousin who had deciphered the Name of God (Scholem 1969), could create a new world according to his or her own specifications becoming a new demiurge.

1.02        Alchemy, as far as we know, failed.  Beginning in the Renaissance, magic and the Magus, according to some, were gradually but progressively rejected (Borchardt 1990).  However, Newton (1642-1727) practiced ‘the Art’ until his death and considered his alchemical work more important than that which became the foundation of modern science (Dobbs 1982, 1991).  In 1936, Sotheby's in London auctioned off a cache of writings by Newton - journals and personal notebooks deemed of no scientific value.  The winning bidder was John Maynard Keynes who, after perusing the papers, noted on the tercentenary of Newton's birth, that Newton, the supreme figure of seventeenth century science, was not the first of the Enlightenment but rather “the Last of the Magicians” and “the last wonder-child to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.” (quoted in Thorndike 1953, 704).  It is interesting that Shackle refers to the Keynesian process of estimating the marginal efficiency of capital as “psychic alchemy” perhaps recognizing Keynes’ interest in Newton’s hidden works (Shackle 1967, 129).  What was the fascination?

1.03            According to Carl Jung the fascination lay not with the physical processes occurring within the Pelican but rather in the projection onto those processes of the unconscious content of the alchemist’s own psyche (Fig. 1).  As the prima materia was transformed through various mystical stages of development, the psychic structure of the alchemist underwent a parallel transformation.  Jung used this finding to develop his concept of ‘individuation’, i.e., the process of psychological differentiation, having for its goal the development of the individual personality (Sharpe 1991). 

Fig. 1: The Pelican

Source: Marie-Louise von Franz, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology,

Inner City Books, Toronto, 1980.

1.04      Jung’s initial work with ancient and medieval texts of Western alchemy was combined with Richard Wilhelm’s 1929 German translation of the Chinese alchemistic text The Secret of the Golden Flower (Wilhelm 1962).  The trans-cultural parallelism of imagery and metaphor – East and West with little if any cross-cultural communication - led to Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, i.e., the structural layer of the human psyche containing inherited elements, distinct from the personal unconscious (Sharpe 1991).

The collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind's evolution, born anew in the brain structure of every individual. (C.G. Jung , “The Structure of the Psyche”, CW 8, par. 342.)

1.05      Jung concluded that the real Pelican was the human cranium in which a process of psychic development took place.  Accordingly, the Philosopher’s Stone was a psychic rather than a physical product.  It symbolized one’s Self, i.e., the archetype of wholeness and the regulating center of the psyche; a transpersonal power that transcends the ego (Sharpe 1991).  In the process of distilling the Philosopher’s Stone, however, it generated insight into lesser problems of concern to the individual including his or her place in the collective world of humanity as a whole. 

1.06            The sealed off nature of the Pelican and the power of the Philosopher’s Stone are appropriate symbols for Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [henceforth Structure] for three reasons.  First, ‘normal science’, Kuhn’s primary epistemic engine, is walled off from the outside world by incommensurability (1962; 103, 112, 148, 150; 1969: 198ff).  And within it, ‘puzzle-solving’ (1962; 34-36) plays the role of the distillation process in the Pelican to progressively refine the findings and facts of the natural sciences. 

1.07            Second, like the Stone’s power to create new worlds, Structure reshaped the academic landscape becoming “…one of the most cited works in the humanities and social sciences, and one of the few major works in these fields that have been received sympathetically by natural scientists” (Fuller 2000; 1).  In effect, Structure “… achieved much of what Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology tried to do… to alleviate the anxieties of alienated academics and defensive policy makers by teaching them that they could all profit from each tending to their homegrown puzzles.  Good paradigms make good neighbors” (Fuller 2000; 7). 

1.08            Third, the alchemist’s belief that God lay trapped in Matter provided the psychic stimulus for development of the natural sciences, e.g., Newton.  It was, however, Robert Bolye who wrote Some Considerations touching the Usefulness of experimental natural philosophy in the 1650s and then A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature (1686) that separated God from the physical world the instant after the Creation.  Unlike Newton, who continued to believe in miracles and Divine Intervention (Harrison 1995), Boyle argued “(r)ather God impose[d] order from the outside at the beginning of creation and matter behaves mechanically to fulfil God’s initial design” (Jacob 1978).  The laws of nature were thus set and established, once and for ever, to become subject to exploration and discovery by ‘free-willed’ humanity using experimental natural philosophy, i.e., the natural sciences: the prima materia of Structure.

1.09            For these three reasons I call Structure: “Thomas Kuhn’s Pelican Brief”.

 

b) Transdisciplinary Circumambulation

1.10      Beyond alchemy, natural science and theology, Structures invokes, in passing, the contribution of aesthetics and intuition to explain scientific revolutions and drops allusions about the effects of economics, history, philosophy and sociology on the development of natural science.  (See para. 1.13: Table 1: Aesthetics 7 = 6/1/0; % 86/14/0; Intuition 2 = 1/1/0; % 50/50/0; Economics 4 = 4/0/0; % 100/0/0; History 96 = 80/10/6; % 83/10/6; Philosophy 58 = 41/12/5; % 71/21/19; Sociology 9 = 5/4/0; % 56/44/0; baseline % 79/16/5)

1.11      To encompass the full meaning and import of Structure thus requires a paradigmatological walk around the text, or a transdisciplinary circumambulation (Figure 2: Transdisciplinary Induction).  The term ‘paradigmatology’ is resurrected from the work of Magorah Maruyama (1974) who replaced it with ‘mindscapes’: 

Although he seems no longer to favour the term, he defined paradigmatology as the “science of structures of reasoning” whether between disciplines, professions, cultures or individuals. He notes that the “problem of communication between different structures of reasoning had not been raised until recently”, since scholars tended either to advocate their own approach or describe that of others. Contributing to this neglect is the fact that the choice between logics is based on factors which are beyond and independent of any logic.

Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential

http://www.uia.org/strategies/stratcom_bodies.php?kap=53

 

Fig. 2

Transdisciplinary Induction

 

1.12      The use of paradigmatology is perhaps best expressed by Eric Neumann with respect to symbolic analysis in analytic psychology:

Symbols gather round the thing to be explained, understood, interpreted.  The act of becoming conscious consists in the concentric grouping of symbols around the object, all circumscribing and describing the unknown from many sides.  Each symbol lays bare another essential side of the object to be grasped, points to another facet of meaning.  Only the canon of these symbols congregating about the center in question, the coherent symbol group, can lead to an understanding of what the symbols point to and of what they are trying to express.

Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, Bollingen Series XLII, Princeton University Press, 1954, .p. 7

1.13      In this research note, I will examine Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 essay The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (3rd Edition, 1996) and two subsequent works (his 1969 Postscript and 1990 article, The Road since Structure).  First, in this Introduction, I have compared the original Kuhnian paradigm to the alchemistic Pelican in the tradition of Carl Jung (CW 12, 13, 14 & 16).  Second, I will next present a model of Kuhn’s original 1962 paradigm including its mechanism, stages, components and exogenous factors.  In the process, I will assess some of its facets as well as the development in Kuhn’s thinking reflected in the page frequency of selected terms in the successive works: 1962, 1969 and 1990 (Table 1, next page).  All text was scanned and a word search conducted (did the term or a variant appear on a page, but not how many times) to develop an enhanced index (Appendix) from which frequency indicators were constructed.  The 1996 edition includes a 'donated' Index by Peter J. Riggs.  I hope hereby to make my small contribution to the ‘objective’ exegesis of this important text.  Reporting is as follows: Total Count = 1962/1969/1990; (%) 1962/1969/1990). The baseline is the total page count in each document: 230 = 182/37/11; (%) 79/16/5.  When the observed frequency varies from the 79/16/5 percent baseline then a change in the direction of the author’s thought may be indicated.  To minimize disruption to the flow of the reader's thought, frequencies are reported at the end of each relevant paragraph.

1.14      It should be noted that the methodology was not applied consistently with respect to footnotes.  In some cases, they were counted; in others they were not.  I do not believe this materially affects results for a given term because internal consistency was maintained.  References in this text without a named author refer, respectively to Kuhn:

(1962) Main Text: 182 pages including Preface, pp. vii-xiv, 1-173.

(1969) Postscript: 37 pages, pp. 174-210.

(1990) Road since Structure: 11 pages, pp. 3-13

1.15      In conclusion, I will assess, in the process, the applicability of the “normal science” paradigm to all three primary contemporary knowledge domains – the Natural & Engineering Sciences (NSE), the Humanities & Social Sciences (H&SS), and the Arts.

Table 1

Comparative Page Frequency of Terms

B – 1962 main text

C – 1969 Postscript

D – 1990 Road since Structure

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The Competitiveness of Nations

in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy

November  2002

WIP Page

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