T. R. Young

The Red Feather Institute

January 14, 1994

CHAPTER 1. Introduction. 98% complete

This Chapter frames the problematics of the knowledge process as it threads its way through human history and cultural formations. It sets the tone of the essays to follow and gives some idea of how they fit together. It is, essentially finished.

CHAPTER 2. Introduction to Postmodern Sensibility. 80% complete.

This Chapter assimilates the language and major points from a variety of works in postmodern critique and frames them in the larger knowledge process.

CHAPTER 3. A Brief History of Steven Hawking. 90% complete.

This one uses Steven Hawking as an icon for modern science and deconstructs those, such as he, who work out of a linear, very formal and very abstract knowledge paradigm. It is a very respectful yet critical survey of the rise and uses of modern science.

CHAPTER 4. A Brief History of Stephen Pfohl. 80% complete.

This essay uses Steve Pfohl, past president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, as an icon for postmodern sensibility. Steve Pfohl is well known for his efforts in criminology and social problems work to introduce Baudrillard, Foucault, Lyotard and others into the SSSP. He has read this essay and finds it congenial to his perspective.

CHAPTER 5. The Archeology of Human Knowledge. 80% complete.

This Chapter considers each of the three epochs; pre-modern, modern and postmodern in terms of its missions, its methods and the chief architects of its body of 'truth.' A version has been published and is available for review.

CHAPTER 6. Pathways to Human Knowledge. 50% complete.

This Chapter looks at the variety of ways in which people have pursued reliable and useful knowledge through pre-modern, modern and postmodern times. Poetry, stories, dance, prayer, trance and divine inspiration frame the knowledge process in traditional knowledge processes. Observation, generalization, prediction, replication, and falsification are epistomological tools useful to modern science. Deconstruction, critique, historical analysis, comparative studies as well as socio-linguistics, phenomenology, dramaturgical analysis, ethnomethodolgy and participant observation are helpful to an understanding of the human role in knowledge processes.

CHAPTER 7. The Poetics of Human Knowledge. 40% complete.

A look at the way in which terms from one domain in life are used as metaphor, simile, and concept in other domains of life...especially in modern science.

CHAPTER 8. Truth.

A concluding Chapter which uses the findings and concepts from the new sciences of complexity, often called Chaos Theory, to explicate the kind and character of authentic knowledge available from the pathways of knowledge used above. A case is made that the human project benefits from all three knowledge processes; that they are not natural enemies to each other, what ever the claims of their practitioners. I like this Chapter.

REFERENCES.