Paradigm: everything goes

While doing some reading on interactivity I stumbled upon an article that sought to shed some light on the concept by doing expert interviews. The authors live in the fantasy that definitions are contingent upon empirical findings (as if empirical findings can ever come to be without prior definitions) and take an inductive approach to defining interactivity. The results are of course completely arbitrary and I will not go into them, let the brief critique of the process itself suffice. What really got me going was an invocation used at the beginning of the article. The chant went something like "reality is socially constructed" and was preceded by the magical word "paradigm". Kuhn probably never realized the damage his theory would do, since it tends to be taken out of context and used as a talk-nonsense-free-card. The idea that reality is socially constructed is one of such brilliant examples, especially since we are supposed to accept it simply because the authors "chose" a specific paradigm. No halfway decent philosopher today clings to such a naive Humeian interpretation of the relationship between subject and object, yet somehow it is acceptable for social scientist if only they present it as a result of their arbitrary will. Marx and Engels already had a nice response to people who believed reality was socially constructed in their day. They answered with the anecdote of a person who believed people drowned merely because they clung to this damned idea of gravity and dedicated his whole life to banishing this idea from minds everywhere he found it.