Do we mix our ways of thought in collaboration? Closely guarded views can lead to isolation. This piece explores the notion of post-paradox as an inclusive worldview across disciplines. Essential to critical thinking, worldview influences all levels of research, education and practice in general but also acupuncture and Chinese medicine.
Not a recommendation of method, I consider worldview related to how we think, create and present knowledge. Neither do I bias against quantitative proof, nor the hard 'proofiness' of randomized controlled trials. I seek a third, inclusive point of view that unifies qualitative and quantitative, subjective and objective, specific and general, calling it post-paradox.
Skills in research methods do not assure awareness of worldview, which operates in the background, forming knowledge and informing decisions.
There are research methods that could employ a worldview of post-paradox including Mixed Methods, Action Research and Grounded Theory1,2.
Or, take for example this rant from viewpoint of Critical Theory3: Science has pursued a belief in the primacy of the objective for too long. A researcher's choice of topic, method, analysis and presentation are embedded within the subjective. Further, the cultural frame in which the researcher operates influences these features. It is time to reveal self from behind the impersonal 3rd person writing of science4. When the researcher articulates their subjective stance, it allows for a more genuine presentation of research. We must fully own our biases and communicate them in the spirit of transparency. Introducing complexity and uncertainty: I could be wrong.
Post-paradoxic has affinity with and roots within the ideas of transdiscipline. The prefix "trans" in transdiscipline suggests that which is at once between, across, and beyond disciplines. I adopt post-paradox as a direct statement of the view, with the goal of understanding the present world as a unity of knowledge5. Resolving dualities, a post-paradoxical view brings a perspective that 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 i