Frank Kogan

You misunderstand what I mean by my two types of metanarratives, so I'll try to make my meaning clearer. Systems (or "systems"; the word is not self-explanatory) like Freud's and Marx's would most certainly go into type (ii) not type (i), though I assume that Marx would include a lot of attempts to claim type (i) support for his system. (I say "assume" because I've not really read enough Marx.) In fact, I'm using Freud's and Marx's and Darwin's and Kuhn's "systems" to define type (ii). Maybe my saying "Oedipus Complex" was misleading, and perhaps I should have chosen "ego," "id," and "superego" instead; but no matter. The reason I chose it is that I believed it to be an organizing principle of Freudian psychology, not just a psychological feature - just as natural selection is an organizing feature of evolutionary biology and paradigm shift is an organizing feature of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. (I'm too ignorant to know for sure that "class conflict" is an organizing feature of Capital, but I believe it is, and if it isn't I'm sure dubdobdee could come up with a better one.)

The reason I'm calling "paradigm shift" a meta element is that it's not simply a fact - "this or that or even all scientific revolutions contain a paradigm shift" - but it's a defining characteristic that explains the revolution. If there's no paradigm shift, then it's not a scientific revolution as Kuhn would define it. There's something frankly circular about this. The idea isn't just supported by the facts, it interprets and creates the facts. (Which doesn't mean that such an idea can't be tested, but it wouldn't so much be tested against its own facts but rather against another idea that also doesn't just explain the facts but gives somewhat different definitions and therefore different facts.) This paragraph is meta too, in that it's definitional, not just observational.

But the term "meta" is a bit misleading here (and therefore so is the term "type (ii) metanarrative") in that I'm not saying that the idea of "paradigm shift" attempts to stand in complete independence of the narratives it is embedded in and defines. An axiom such as "paradigm shift" or "natural selection" is relatively axiomatic in relation to the constellation of narratives of which it is a part rather than absolutely axiomatic.

That I'm calling the systems of Freud and Marx and Darwin and Kuhn "type (ii) metanarratives" doesn't mean that these people didn't ever venture into type (i) metanarratives (as I said, my guess is that Marx did this a lot), but that you can strip that out of their writing and still come up with their basic systems.