The Fishbowl Problem

Every research tradition contains what its practitioners cannot see. This is not metaphor for ignorance; it is a structural feature of how traditions function. A tradition that held all its assumptions open to simultaneous scrutiny would be paralyzed. The capacity to take certain things for granted, to treat certain commitments as settled so that attention can be directed to the problems that remain unsettled, is what allows a tradition to be productive. The cost of that productivity is blindness to the assumptions that enable it. Laudan's reticulated model formalizes what Segal's fishbowl metaphor captures phenomenologically: at any given moment, some commitments are background, and the effort of making background visible — pressing one's face against the glass to see the world beyond the water's refractions — is the hardest intellectual work any tradition can undertake.