Frank Kogan

So what's a type (i) metanarrative? A type (i) metanarrative would be a narrative that purports to ground something - such as a type (ii) metanarrative - in a set of principles that are outside the circle.

E.g., a type (i) metanarrative would be the claim that Marx's ideas are true because he followed scientific method - an explanation of "scientific method" would then be given. Some type (i) principles (not necessarily the ones chosen by a Marxist, however) would be the three dogmas of empiricism disparaged by Quine (who attacked the first two) and Davidson (who attacked the third): first, that (in Quine's words) there is a "fundamental cleavage" between truths that are grounded in meaning independently of fact, and truths that are grounded in fact (this is the analytic-synthetic dichotomy); second, that "each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience" (Quine called this "reductionism"); and third, that there's a fundamental cleavage between content (what's given to you by the world) and scheme (how you organize that content). These dogmas don't merely purport to structure a particular story about the world (such as Darwin's story), but to structure our entire experience of the world, of any world.

The reason I think it's important for you to distinguish between type (i) and type (ii) metanarratives is that Quine, Wittgenstein, Kuhn, Davidson et al. didn't just feel incredulous towards type (i) metanarratives, they made specific arguments as to why they believed such narratives to be impossible or unintelligible. Their arguments - that fact and theory are intertwined, that "first" principles are somewhat dependent on nonfirst principles, etc. - leave the bulk of Freud and Marx and Darwin and Kuhn unscathed. That Freud and Marx have foundered isn't owing to our no longer believing in theory-independent facts but because of a lot of specific problems people had in making Freud and Marx work. But note that Darwin hasn't foundered; I haven't read much Lyotard, and you've always been bashful about elaborating on your ideas, but my impression is that people who would declare themselves incredulous towards metanarratives would nonetheless be open to endorsing The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions and its attack on the empiricist metanarrative, not noticing that Structure is itself a metanarrative in the same way that Freudian psychology and Marxism are metanarratives.