 transcends the objective and the subjective, embracing both from a third place6. The keystone of post-paradox lays within the unification of the meanings that traverse and lay beyond different disciplines7.
Post-paradoxical thought includes levels of reality, logic of an included middle (the center of paradox), and complexity. Shifting logic can bring a change in perspective7. New knowledge emerges when disciplines encounter each other, inviting a new vision of nature and reality, posing a framework for what we believe to be true. Tools of knowledge include the admitted involvement of the researcher in the process of inquiry, and an awareness of the degree to which knowledge is constructed6.
The post-paradox view allows the practitioner and society to better meet the needs of building an inclusive body of evidence, one that might include a history of medical case studies, experience based knowledge and the rich data field of the qualitative domain in addition to the quantitative proofs. New possibilities and an open-minded rationale are achieved by re-examining the concepts of subjectivity and objectivity.
Try it. We can explore assumptions about objective and subjective data during clinical intake. A physician's observations (biomedical, naturopathic or AOM) are considered to be objective and the patient report of symptoms subjective. This does not take into account the culturally bound beliefs that inform a physician's inquiry, a subjective process. As a physician, analyze your SOAP notes (subjective, objective, assessment, plan), and take that feature assigned to 'objective' and break it down. Just how much of your subjective state influences what you record as objective? The information relayed upon your neo-cortex of sight, sound, smell and touch were constructed into impressions. You had to decide which of those impressions were valuable and which were not… this is what then gained primacy in the record of the 'objective' in your SOAP notes.
Language and Logic
Logics form many assumptions that take place in communication and correspondingly, in practice. AOM profession binds itself into a monoculture of mind through unconscious adherence to logics of Aristotle, which has three postulates:
axiom of identity: that which is A is A.
axiom of non-contradiction: that which is not A cannot be A.
axiom of the non-included middle: there exists no third term, T which is at the same time A and non-A. In other words, there is no paradox.
Many who practice classical forms of Chinese medicine approach the problem from an Aristotelian view.
It is reasonable to consider that contemporary Chinese medicine developed in alignment with Cartesian philosophical dictums, rooted in Aristotelian thought. The extent of the Silk Road and its influences on medical thought were not isolated events. Examples of such influences are located in slogans used by Chairman Mao's government in state developed forms of TCM:
The Cooperation of Chinese and Western Medicine: 1945-50
The Unification of Chinese and Western Medicine: 1950-58
Chinese Medicine Studies Western Medicine: 1950-53
Western Medicine Studies Chinese Medicine: from 1954–58
Integration of Chinese and Western Medicine: 1958 – Present (8, pp. 23-28).
Net result of these campaigns: a synthesized practice of Chinese and Western medicine, currently taught in the major university medical systems throughout China. Chinese medicine, as practiced today and no matter where on this great globe, has an integral composition of thought threads forming it.
We return to discussion of the Aristotelian-Cartesian worldview. Descartes provided rules for thinking that involved reduction, simplification and clarity in Discourse on Method9. This reductionism may be located in the gold standard of quantitative research, the randomized, double blinded, placebo controlled trial, where environmental complexities are limited with the intent of control that simplifies and clarifies the inquiry. These rules for directing the mind, coupled with Aristotelian logic, have become the foundation for good thinking, which 