Hello, and welcome to episode 19 of Structured Visions. Structured Visions is a space where I explore new ways of thinking about social structure. My name is Dirty Clark, and I thank you for listening. You are very welcome here.
I'd like to begin this episode by thinking about a term that everyone, I'm sure, has heard. You've probably heard it way too much, and that's the term paradigm shift. You've probably heard it in terms of business of business of the business world. This new item represents a paradigm shift, or there's this new way of thinking that represents a paradigm shift, or a new way of spreading peanut butter on toast represents a paradigm shift.
I want to explore that notion of the paradigm. Go back a little bit to where that idea of the paradigm shift came from, but also explore it in terms of linguistic structure and finally of social structure. So the notion of the paradigm came about, especially the paradigm as a way of understanding how change happens, how new ways of thinking come about, was originated with Thomas Cun's work called the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. And Thomas Cun was exploring the ways in which change happens in science and he was going against the commonly understood idea that you have an idea in science, and then something comes along to illustrate that there might be something exciting wrong with that idea, and then you have a new idea, and then something comes along to show, okay, there's new evidence now, so there's a different idea now.
And he says, well, no, it doesn't actually work that way, because scientific research operates under particular paradigms, so particular ways of seeing the world. And one piece of evidence that shows that that way of seeing the world might be flawed isn't ever enough to get rid of your whole paradigm. So often Thomas Cun noted what happens. So if you have an idea, your paradigm is that the world is flat, and then there's a piece of evidence that suggests that the world might be something other than flat, then you'd say, then it was, oh, no, no, no, no, there's a flaw in your method, there's a flaw in your reasoning.
The world's flat is probably a bad example, because the idea that it was flat was, it was sort of came before the scientific method became a way, a method of inquiry. But nevertheless, changes to paradigms, or evidence that suggest a change to paradigm, was often seen as a flaw in the research, a problem with methodology and anomaly, and what needs to happen is there needs to be enough anomalies to produce what Cun called a crisis. You know, and so if there's a crisis in the scientific world and there's enough anomalies, then that's the point where you say, oof, there might be something wrong with our paradigm. And sometimes these paradigms can be pretty tricky to shift, but when they do shift, it's like, oh, wow, look at this, there's a whole new way of seeing it.
And now we can actually reinterpret this evidence. So again, paradigm should have started to be used for absolutely everything now. I want to maybe think about how that term is used in linguistics. And so in linguistics, paradigm is a slightly different way of understanding things.
So a paradigm is often used in relation to a similar word, which is the word Sintame. So paradigm is spelled P-A-R-A-D-I-G-M, and Sintame is spelled S-Y-N-T-A-G-M. Both of those words come to us through Latin via Greek, and the adjective forms are, paradigm is paradigmatic, so a paradigmatic analysis. And Sintame, the adjective is a syntax-matics.
So you could have a syntax-matics relationship or a syntax-matics analysis. And the notion of the, in order to understand this paradigm-sintame-sintame relationship, think in terms of a sentence. And actually imagine that the sentence is written down. So I'm going to give you a sentence.
And the sentence I'm going to give you is, I love broccoli. So let's imagine that you're writing that sentence down. So it's an English, so you start on the left-hand side of the page and you write, I love and love Gostrok, so that's the right of I, and then broccoli goes to the right of love. So I love broccoli, three words, in a linear relation that goes from left to right on your page.
Okay. Now, when you do a Sintame-matic analysis, what you're analyzing is the sequence of those three words in the sentence. And it's interesting that it's like, okay, well, when you start thinking in terms of the sequence, it's what follows what comes first, what comes second, what comes third. So it's Sintame-matic relation shows that I comes before love, which comes before broccoli.
And it's Sintame-matic relationship shows us that there's only a certain number of sequences that are kind of permissible to make sense in the English language. So you can say I love broccoli, but love I broccoli slightly less, makes slightly less sense, not because we don't understand the words, but because the sequence isn't permissible. So Sintame-Sintame-matic is about the sequence. Now, when we start thinking about sequences, the sequences of words, the linear relationship between the words, if you like, then we can start thinking about different sequences, that are meaningful in English.
So we effectively take the same words, I love broccoli, and we add different words to the sequence to change the meaning. So let's say that you want to introduce to that sentence the notion of negative, okay? So I love broccoli. How do you introduce negative to that?
So that's a kind of linguistic notion, positive, negative, let's add negative. So to add negative, what do you say? I like broccoli not, you might say that some languages, not usually so much in English. Normally what you have to do is add an auxiliary to the verb.
So the verb is love. And the auxiliary that you have to add generally to make it negative is do. I do love broccoli, and then you add the negative particle, which is not. So I do not love broccoli, and then you can, I really do that, not really contract that, too.
I don't love broccoli. I love broccoli. I don't love broccoli. And so the relationship between those two things is a relationship of sequence.
We've changed the sequence in order to change the meaning. I love broccoli, I don't love broccoli. Okay, now there's other things you can do to the sequence of I love broccoli. You can do something called create a cleft sentence.
And this is an aspect of topicalization. So it's like, what do we want to be at the front of the sentence? So in I love broccoli, the thing is all the way to left on your page is the word I. And so there's a type of analysis called a thematic analysis, which is to say that the kind of focal point or the important thing or the thing that you want to bring first in the sentence is that the theme of the sentence is the first thing that comes out, I love broccoli.
But if I actually want to bring into focus a different aspect of that sentence, if I want the theme to be the broccoli rather than the I, I can do a cleft sentence. So I can say it's broccoli, I love. And so what I'm doing is I'm dividing up the subject and I'm using something called a dummy subject, which is it, it is broccoli that I love. And I'm effectively creating two little clauses within that sentence, it is broccoli that I love.
And then the emphasis changes a little bit. The broccoli becomes kind of the thing that I'm putting into focus there. It is broccoli I love. You can imagine that relationship too.
I thought you loved carrots, it's broccoli that I love. Okay, so that's a cleft sentence. So that's again, a sequencing change. You can change the order of the words, but according to the rules of English, if you like, you have to change them in a particular way.
Now there's another type of English which you might be familiar with, which is Yoda English. So this is the type of English that Yoda from Star Wars would use. And so he is very good at syntagmatic shifting. So rather than saying I love broccoli, if it were Yoda he would probably say something like, love broccoli, I do.
So he's famous for putting his subjects at the end of his sentences in a particular type of Yoda speech. And so that's a syntagmatic change. He's changing the sequence, he's changing the syntamed. Love broccoli, I do.
Now interestingly for Yoda to do that, he's got to add the auxiliary, love broccoli, I do. He can't simply say love broccoli, I. It would no longer be appropriate Yoda speech. Now there's other things you can do as well.
You can add components to that sentence. So I love broccoli as subject verb object, subject noun phrase, noun phrase, noun phrase verb phrase, noun phrase, subject verb object. And you can add other parts of speech in there, again, to change the sequence a little bit. So I could say rather than I love broccoli, I could say I really love broccoli.
I could say I really don't love broccoli. I could say I really truly love broccoli. I could say I really truly, madly, deeply, passionately, wondrously, ecstatically love broccoli. And the thing about the sequence is, and the sequence in English is you could pretty much put any number of those are adverbs.
You could pretty much put any number of adverbs before love. I really, truly, deeply, madly, passionately, wondrously, happily, et cetera. Love broccoli, you could put any number that you could actually think of before love broccoli. So there's no limit to the units that you add to the sequence.
You could add, you could make the noun phrase bigger. So the object, the noun phrase that serves this object, you could make that bigger if you want. I love broccoli. I love broccoli with almond flakes.
I loved steamed broccoli. I love raw broccoli. So then you're adding an adjective to your noun phrase. You're adding a prepositional phrase to your noun phrase.
You can add all kinds of things to your noun phrase. So you're augmenting the sequence. You're adding to the sequence. And all of that is a syntagmatic change, a syntagmatic shift all along the level of the sequence.
Okay, so you've got your sentence that you've written across your page, and it goes from left to right, in a kind of a row, a linear sequence. Now I want you to add to that dimension, you've got your kind of x, y, x, or whatever, your x-axis. I love broccoli that goes from left to right. Now I want you to add a vertical dimension to your horizontal.
So your syntagmatic sequence is your horizontal line, the sentence that goes from left to right. And now I want you to take the word broccoli, and I want you to go up. So let's imagine your sentence is at the bottom of your page. I love broccoli.
And then I want you to imagine a whole column that goes above broccoli. And then I want you to think about all of the words that you could put in that column that could replace the word broccoli and still be a meaningful sentence in English. So I love cauliflower. So cauliflower goes in that column.
I love cabbage, so cabbage goes in that column. I love ice cream. Ice cream can go in that column. I love television.
Television can go in that column. I love coffee. Coffee can go in that column. I love fingernails.
They can go in that column. Other types of things. I love Tina. Okay, so we've got a proper noun in that column.
I love democracy. So we've got an abstract noun in that column. And if you were to look down that whole column and you're seeing all the things that you could replace the word broccoli with and still have a meaningful sentence in English, excuse me, then what you're looking at is paradigmatic analysis. You will find all of the things in that column are either nouns or noun phrases.
So what we find is that I love broccoli. That broccoli bit there is a kind of place whereby if you were going to replace it, it would have to be with the same type of constituent. And the constituent has to be a noun phrase or something that serves as a noun in that sentence. And so suddenly you've got a whole list of potentially disparate terms.
Like what does democracy have to do with fingernails? You know, what does coffee, excuse me, have to do with Tina? They all seem a little bit strange. Why would they be in the same class?
Why are they all nouns? How can we understand them all as nouns? But rather than thinking of it in terms of all other naming words or person places or objects and that type of thing, which is like, that's a bit abstract, instead we can see it as part of a paradigm that nouns in sentences are paradigms. And we can replace the paradigms with other choices.
And all of the things that could potentially go in that spot in the sentence, we can say our nouns. So the next time you're teaching somebody grammar and you're trying to tell them what a noun is, don't tell them it's a person place or a thing, don't tell them it's a naming word, say what would you put in the sentence, I love broccoli other than broccoli. And everything they come up with is a noun, most of time. They might come up with a pronoun and they might come up with a noun phrase.
But, you know, we're simplifying, excuse me. So this notion of the linguistic paradigm can be linked, I would say, to the notion of paradigm as a way of thinking. And we can actually look at that by looking at some slightly more meaningful examples. Last week I was talking about, last week I posted a podcast on Friday, a Friday morning on the 13th of November.
And I was describing how social structures are like spiderwebs that support us, you know, as we go through their invisible ways of thinking about the world, made up of assumptions, linked assumptions, complexes of assumptions, multiplexes of assumptions, that support our way of understanding the world and walking through the world. And I talked about the enormous clarity that can sometimes come, but also the enormous devastation that can sometimes come, when those structures are pulled out from under us, when the spiderweb of our social structure, our way of seeing the world, is ripped apart. And I discussed how the response to that can sometimes be as poignant and as simple as telling the story, describing the world as you see it from that perspective. And I didn't know when I published that podcast about the devastating events that would happen on that day.
I didn't know that there were going to be terrorists to tax in Paris, and I didn't know that there were gonna be bombings in Beirut. And looking back over that podcast, there's a poignancy to this idea that your world can be ripped out from underneath you. And it doesn't always happen in only an ideological way. It also happens in a material way.
And I have been thinking about how people describe their social worlds. And my research is about how in these descriptions of people's worlds, in people's descriptions of their social worlds, can be identified when I'm calling the desire for alternative social structure. And I encountered this in a video that's gone viral. That was a clip from the television show, the Parisi, or the French television show, Lupitigionel that airs on the Channel Canal Pete.
And there's an interview outside the Batakonoguitar in Paris where some of the attacks took place. And it's an astonishing interview. The interviewer is standing in front of a father and son. And they're both down standing at the level of the son so that they can look into the son's eyes.
And the father is standing slightly behind the son. And the interviewer asks the little boy, do you understand what's happened? Do you understand what's happened here? And around then is the buzz of people responding to this event.
They're clearly playing their respects by putting down flowers and candles and this type of thing. And the little boy responds by saying, yes, I understand. They're these bad guys. You have the mission.
And they're very, very, very bad. They're so mean. And then he says, and what we're going to have to do is this little boy. We've got to be careful because now we're going to have to move.
And he uses the expression, the expression, shong-jude amaisal, which in British English would be translated, we're going to have to move house. In French, the literal translation is change houses. We're going to change houses. So in American English, you're going to have to move.
In British English, you can say move house. And that's closer to the French. We're going to have to shong-jude amaisal. We're going to have to change house.
And the father says to the little boy, don't worry. We don't have to move. We don't have to move house. We don't have to move.
He says, France is our house. France. And Maisel and French can be in house and also home. So we're going to have to move home.
Don't worry, says the father. We don't have to move home. France is our home. And the little boy says to him, the daddy, there are bad guys here.
You know, it's like the little boy saying, do you not get it done? There are bad guys. Of course we have to move. There are bad guys here.
And the father turns to him and says, there's bad guys everywhere. Now, let's talk about that. So in French, it's the little boy says, nie-die-mich-tung-pah-da. There are bad guys.
And the father responds by saying, mie-die-mich-tung-pah-doo. Yes, there are bad guys everywhere. So let's think about it in terms of the translation. Let's think about those two sentences.
There are bad guys. There are bad guys everywhere. There's a shift. The boy says one thing.
The man says another. And in terms of that symptomatic parodigmatic relationship, what's the shift? Is it a shift of sequence or is it a shift of choice? Is it a horizontal shift or a vertical shift?
And it actually is a shift of sequence. There are bad guys. There are bad guys everywhere. So the father repeats the same sentence.
And he adds to the end a new constituent. So he's changing the sequence. He's adding something new to the sequence. And what he adds is the adverb everywhere.
There are bad guys. There are bad guys everywhere. OK. And so the sense is that that might not be overwhelmingly reassuring to the little boy.
He's saying, we've got to move. We can't stay there. Bad guys. And the dad says, there are bad guys everywhere.
So it's a syntagmatic shift. But it's not reassuring. It doesn't help. It's a shift of perspective.
But it doesn't really help a little boy. And he says, but daddy, they have guns. They have guns. And they're going to shoot us.
We've got to move because the bad guys have guns. And they're going to shoot us. They're up here. Now listen to what the dad says.
The little boy says they have guns. The dad says, they have guns. We have flowers. They have guns.
We have flowers. Think about now the grammatical shift. Is that a shift of sequence? Or is that a vertical shift?
Is that a shift of choice? They have guns. We have flowers. It's a paradigm shift.
Guns is a noun phrase. At the end of they have something. And so is flowers. And what the father has done is made a new choice.
He's made a new choice to slot within that constituent slot. Rather than guns, we're going to replace it with flowers. A paradigm shift. Linguistically.
Potentially unconvincing, right? Well, paradigm shifts are always unconvincing. Because one piece of evidence isn't enough to change the whole paradigm. A paradigm is the way we see the world.
One piece of evidence. You can't just change the word guns for flowers and expect. The whole paradigm to shift, right? You expect me to see the world in a different way because you're just like flowers.
And the little boy says that he says dad flowers don't do anything. Suffer the young. Flowers don't do anything. Therefore, and he's trying to explain what flowers are for.
And he can't quite come up with a word. What are they for? They're not for doing stuff that's going to help us when these bad guys come in. And what are flowers for?
But therefore, Sipo and the little boy stumble a little bit. And then the father points in a direction off camera. And he says for the little boy, do you see all those people who've put those flowers there? He says, do you see?
They've all put those flowers there. He says, Lefle, Sipo, Combabro, Lippisturie. Flowers are for fighting against guns. Flowers will fight the guns.
Flowers are for fighting against guns. OK, now listen to what happens next. So flowers are for fighting against guns is effectively Lefle, Sipo, Combabro, Lippisturie. Lefle is flowers.
Sipo, they are for combator fighting against the guns. Flowers are for fighting against guns. And the little boy says Sipo, Potege, therefore protecting. We have another linguistic paradigm shift there.
The man says, therefore fighting. And the little boy says, therefore protecting. In that slot, therefore doing something. The man says fighting and the little boy says, protecting.
Both of those are in the French, their infinitives, in the English, their gerunds. But in any case, there are two words that have the same status, have the same constituent status. They have very different functions. Fighting is a very different type of verb than protecting.
And you think in order for the idea that the flowers might have some kind of power in this scary world that the little boy is describing, he has to do a paradigm shift of his dad's construction. He doesn't see how flowers can fight. He doesn't understand how flowers can do something. He's already said that flowers don't do anything.
But the word protect has a different status, function, semantic relationship than the word fight. Therefore, protecting. He can see how an inert object could serve to protect you, even if he can't see how an inert object, like a flower, can fight against something. But now we have a complete paradigm shift.
Guns do things. And flowers do things. And the things guns do is fight and the things flowers do is protect. And then suddenly the boy is prepared for the paradigm shift.
He looks at the flowers and he says, and there's candles there too. And then says yes, people have put the flowers and the candles there to remember the people who left us yesterday. And the little boy says, the flowers and the candles, they're for protecting us. And we have a new social structure.
Suddenly, a new way of imagining things. I knew if you like a paradigm. So the idea is we can't see how the prayers and the flowers and the acts of kindness. We don't see how they can actually fight, or at least the little boy can't.
But he can imagine the notion of protection. And let's think again to the beginning of what he says, we're going to have to move house. If for Scholger de Miesle, we're going to have to move house. Now what does a house do?
A house protects us. And he says, we're going to have to move house because the house can't protect us anymore. And the dad says, because they're bad guys and they're really mean. And the house can't protect us.
And the dad says, ah, no, Francis our house. And the little boy says, no, no, no, no, Francis isn't capable of protecting us anymore. We're going to have to go somewhere else with our bad guys everywhere. Oh, no.
What are we going to do? There's a different way of thinking about protection. And the different way of thinking about protection is civilized by these flowers and by these candles. It's a paradigm shift.
But it's a linguistic paradigm shift. So does that make it less important? I don't know. The video is gone viral.
Every time I watch it, I cry. And it seems to me that these descriptions, these heartfelt descriptions of social worlds, here's what's happened. We're going to have to move house. The people are going to shoot us.
What are we going to do? These heartfelt descriptions, these conversations, these communications, they're grammatically structured. And when we look at these grammatical structures, we've got little windows into social structures. And it seems to me that the earliest change, the closest, the quickest way of understanding change, the biggest shifts can have the level of grammar because we can change grammar like that.
We can change the grammatical structure of our sentences like that. We can't change the social structure of our world that quickly. But if we go to the grammatical structure of the way we're describing our worlds, we can get new windows about new ways of thinking about things. And I think in that case, we can get a window into a world in which we are protected by whatever it is that flowers and candles symbolize.
Thank you for listening today. I hope to hear from you next week.