By JAKE MOKRIS, home-schooled
I am going to say something that probably will not surprise those of you who have read my articles: I watch Fox News. I enjoy the “O’Reilly Factor,� and when I come downstairs to eat breakfast, my mom often has the TV on “Fox & Friends." But the Fox News show I find the most interesting is “Hannity & Colmes."
On the one side is Sean Hannity – he’s very conservative, and his arguments are somewhat simplistic. Alan Colmes is on the liberal side – his thought processes are more complex than Hannity’s, but Colmes can take his arguments on some weird turns. Imagine these two together, commenting on the news for an hour. What happens?
Who cares? I’ll answer that later, but really, you have to watch this show – it comes on weekdays at 9 p.m. Hannity and Colmes just go from one issue to another and have completely opposite viewpoints every time. When they have three or four guests, the show can become hilarious: One person talks, then another, and Colmes says something like, “But, isn’t it like this…� The liberal guest completely agrees, and then Hannity says they’re both absolutely wrong. But neither side listens. They might even have conflicting facts or reports of events. It’s like watching a broken Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots game – it never ends, and no one wins. Of course, the debate is always civil.
I had a purpose for this long description: I’m trying to get more people to watch Fox News. Not exactly – I think there’s a tendency today for people to constrict themselves within their paradigms.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines a paradigm as “a set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them.� Paradigms are like worldviews or belief systems.
The idea of paradigms and “paradigm shifts� came in the 1960s from physics graduate student Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn’s original idea was to apply paradigms to the way scientific theories are constructed: Instead of simply gathering the facts and watching them automatically turn themselves into an objective scientific framework, scientists hold paradigms – assumptions based on culture, opinion and previous scientific knowledge – through which they understand the facts.
One of the properties of paradigms is “incommensurability." It’s hard to explain; it basically means that paradigms are incompatible as interpretations. But incommensurability means a little more than that: Since different paradigms have different assumptions and definitions, someone in one paradigm might not completely understand someone who holds another paradigm.
When people debate using opposing assumptions, the debate will eventually become stuck around one of those assumptions. This seems to me exactly what happens on “Hannity & Colmes� and in many debates, especially over political issues. Too often, liberals think only within the liberal paradigm, and conservatives stay in the conservative paradigm. I believe the intelligent design debate is stuck on the definition of science within different paradigms – but I don’t want to discuss that now.
The way to get debates “unstuck� is to move to a deeper level, to examine the assumptions that are made. That doesn’t mean pondering the foundations of paradigms; just check if someone is assuming something unnecessary or unproven. That’s what Hannity, Colmes and everyone else should do.
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