epistemological break

(in science) the ‘revolutionary’ replacement of one theoretical framework – PARADIGM or PROBLEMATIQUE – by another. In the view of Thomas KUHN or Louis ALTHUSSER, the relations between rival or successive paradigms is always liable to be one of disjuncture and INCOMMENSURABILITY, in which the central concepts and procedures of one paradigm or problematique are unstatable in the language of the other: to quote Paul FEYERABEND, different paradigms involve different ‘worlds’ (see also FORMS OF LIFE). In the work of Althusser, the concept of the epistemological break is central to the sharp distinction he draws between the early ‘humanistic’ writings and the later 'S cientific’ writings of Marx.

Collins Dictionary of Sociology, 3rd ed. © HarperCollins Publishers 2000

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References in periodicals archive

They included the Kamiriithu theatre project, writing two powerful novels in Gikuyu, and his famous claim that he had made an epistemological break from English and the world associated with it.His novel Wizard of the Crow is a quintessential work of exile.

Ngugi's novels are a tale of his life over the years

He thus aims to displace Althusser's depiction of Marx's oeuvre as divided by one constitutive epistemological break (7-10; cf.

Barbour, Charles. The Marx Machine: Politics, Polemics, Ideology

Nevertheless, we believe that the findings of their study may be due to the particularities of SC behavior in areas with prolonged, armed conflicts; that is, before necessarily suggesting an epistemological break, this "anomaly" suggests a particular effect in certain contexts.

The other social capital: a needed look at Latin America

The claim of The Studio is not then just aesthetic, it is epistemological; realism as an epistemological break with the dead weight of ideological mystifications.

For want of a magisterium: modernist art and the Church of England

As splits, they provide the model for its main theoretical structure: the epistemological break or, more literally, cut ("coupure"), which is the mature Marx's alleged paradigm shift from his own youthful humanist idealism to scientific materialism.

History and the traumatic narrative of desire and enjoyment in Althusser

We have witnessed that since the late 20th century the epistemological break came with the paradigm shift towards contextual theologies from the perspectives of uprooted and oppressed peoples.

Francis Anekwe Oborji (ed.), Concepts of Mission: The Evolution of Contemporary Missiology

Ngugi subsequently stated that "it was Kamirithu which forced me to turn to Gikuyu and hence into what has amounted to an epistemological break with my past" (Decolonizing the Mind).

Ngugi wa Thiong'o. (Kenya)

Thus, while somewhat more moderate in tone than Augustine, Aquinas does not represent a substantial epistemological break. Thus, in the final analysis, this does not mark a substantial change in political prescription.

INTERPRETING GOD'S TRUTH: A POSTMODERN INTERPRETATION OF MEDIEVAL EPISTEMOLOGY

He likens Blake's moment of crisis, which marks a break with his past, to the 'epistemological break' in Marx that Althusser identified in The German Ideology.

Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake

No one, least of all the physicist, is unaware of the fact that the dawn of modern science brought with it a necessary and definitive epistemological break with the then traditional view of nature and thus the difference between the earthly and the heavenly, which was thought of as ontological.

Images of the Sky (A Chronicle)

Raulet acknowledges a development in Marx's thought from his "early" to his "late" writings but without subscribing to the Althusserian "epistemological break" thesis (coupure epistemologique) which points to a distinct "philosophical" early period as opposed to a "scientific" mature one ("une periode `philosophique' et une periode `scientifique'").

Marx