the four right chords can make me cry

Brace yourselves.
Complicated reading ahead. Took me quite a few readings to get a good grip of this text. But it's worth it! Fascinating stuff! Why can't my non-USP modules be this engaging...

Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and The Philosophy of Science
Alasdair MacIntyre

There is perhaps a possible world in which 'empiricism' would have become the name of a mental illness, while 'paranoia' would be the name of a well-accredited theory of knowledge. For in this world empiricists would be consistent and unrelenting - unlike Hume - and they would thus lack any means to order their experience of other people or of nature. Even a knowledge of formal logic would not help them; for until they knew how to order their experiences they would possess neither sentences to formalize nor reasons for choosing one way of formalizing them rather than another. Their world would indeed be reduced to that chaos which Bettleheim perceives in the child at the beginning of the oedipal phase. Empiricism would lead not to sophistication, but to regression. Paranoia by contrast would provide considerable resouces for living in the world. The empiricist maxims 'Believe only what can be based upon sense-experience' or Occam's razor, would leave us bereft of all generalizations and therefore of all attitudes towards the future (or the past). They would isolate us in a contentless present. But the paranoid maxims 'Interpret everything which happens as an outcome of envious malice' and 'Everyone and everything will let you down' receive continuous confirmation for those who adopt them. Hume cannot answer the question: "What beings surround me?" But Kafka knew the answer to this very well: "In fact the clock has certain personal relationships to me, like many things in the room, save that now, particularly since I gave notice - or rather since I was given notice...- they seem to be beginning to turn their backs on me, above all the calendar.... Larely it is as if it had been metamorphosed. Either it is absolutely uncommunicative - forexample, you want its advice, you go up to it, but the only thing it says is 'Feast of the Reformation' - which probably has a deeper signigicance, but who can discover it? - or, on the contrary, it is nastily ironic."
So in this possible world they will speak of Hume's Disease and of Kafka's Theory of Knowledge. Yet is this possible world so different from that which we inhabit? What leads us to segregate at least some types of mental illness from ordinary, sane behaviour is that they presuppose and embody ways of interpreting the natural and social world which are radically discordant with our customary and, as we take it, justified modes of interpretation. That is, certain types of mental illness seem to presuppose rival theories of knowledge. Conversely every theory of knoledge offers us schemata for accepting some interpretations of the natural and social world rather than others. As Hamlet discovered earlier, the categories of psychiatry and of epistemology must be to some extent interdefinable.

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Ok, back to my essay now. Deadline flying towards me! Its hard work, but I chose 3 super-interesting texts! MacIntyre (what you read was just an extract... can you imagine), the article by Harvey Sacks (I featured it some time ago...) and... The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery!!! What kind of an essay am i writing?!?! Haha... I don't know either, my essays seem to take a life of their own right after i finish writing the first sentence. okok... I'd better get going.

posted by beckyboo @ 4:01 PM