About Project Diktuon » Paradigm and discourse

Some initial toughts about the role of paradigm and discourse in our communication.

In a more tangible level, we have our own conceptions about how the world is like, especially about how God and salvation are like. This is called doctrine. The doctrine is essentially a mere attempt to describe the reality. Differences in our doctrines reflect our failures to percieve, understand, describe and communicate that to each other.

Being a description, these toughts are formulated in certain language – a discourse – and from a given point of view – a paradigm. Paradigm is what we think about things before we start to look at them in more detail. In essence it is the set of our prejudices. Discourse in turn is the language we use to talk about things. It is more than just words, it is the meanings of those words, feelings and themes associated with them, the conventions used to express things.

We should be aware that both our paradigm and our discourse differ. Farmer living in the outskirts of Ireland has different worldview than juvenile criminal in London – and even while they may use the same words, they speak different languages. Similarly we should not expect that we understand each other simply because we understand what the other person is saying. There may be subtle meanings he does not communicate, because he thinks they are obvious and you have never heard of. Therefore understanding is always an effort.

Similarly, both paradigms and discourses tend to change. Our individual paradigms evolve or shake as we grow, but the collective paradigms do the same. For example, for centuries the Newtonian mechanics were the paradigm of scientific community. That paradigm was abolished by quantum physics and the theory of relativity. If we now look at the texts people with that paradigm wrote, we need to adapt our own thinking into their paradigm. And to communicate the same things, to describe the same reality in the same way as they did, we need to restate it. Our thinking – paradigm and discourse – is different, therefore to say the same we need to say it again, in our own languages, in our way. The reality hasn’t changed, our description has.

The same applies to our doctrine, our attempt to describe the spiritual reality. The creeds were written in another time and another place. They describe their issues well, in their respective historical contexts. But thay may mean little to us. Therefore we need to restate the same things, in a way we find relevant and understandable.

In this attempt we need to study the reality, the Bible (which is the only reliable revelation of God) the old descriptions and each others conceptions about reality. We need to adapt to the different paradigms and bring the meanings of those to our own to compare them with others. The aim is to describe the reality better: both more accurately and more understandably.

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