Notes
1
Moreover, the system can derive its definition from the choice of observation, as in the delayed choice
experiment devised by John Wheeler (Goswami, 107-108). In this experiment, a beam of photons is
split by a half-silvered mirror and then mirrored so that the paths cross. If a photon detector is placed at
the end of a path, then the number of photons that travelled that path can be counted; in this case, the
photon has behaved like a particle and travelled along one path or the other. On the other hand, if a
screen is placed at the point of intersection, an interference pattern will result; in this case, the photon
has behaved like a wave and travelled along both paths. The subtlety of this experiment is that the
choice to count or look for interference can be made after the photon would have passed
through the half-silvered mirror; that is, after it would have "decided" to behave as a particle or
a wave. The choice of observation retroactively determines the whether the observed system is a
particle-photon or a wave-photon. Goswami writes, "There is no paradox in the delayed-choice
experiment, if you give up the idea that there is a material world laid in concrete even when we are not
observing it" (108).
2
Here and throughout, Eichner uses "modern science" to refer to the enlightenment science developed
between 1500 and 1800, and he regrettably does not discuss the implications of the "modern physics"
of the turn of this century.
3
In addition to the examples I have given of literature and sociology, Hayles provides another
interesting manifestation of the field model: structuralist linguistics. Saussurean linguistics, she writes,
has the characteristics of a field model because "the entire linguistic structure changes with the addition
or omission of a single lexical unit" (22).
4
Kuhn also discusses this with some of the pro-natural science bias to which Giddens reacted. He writes,
"it remains an open question what parts of social science have yet acquired such paradigms at all"
(15).
5
Lyotard's use of "postmodern" may seem to conflict with the emphasis in this paper on conditions of
"modernity" (and with Giddens's outright disavowal of the existence of postmodernity). However,
Fredric Jameson writes in the introduction that "Lyotard is in reality quite unwilling to posit a
postmodernist stage radically different from the period of high modernism and involving a fundamental
historical and cultural break with this last" (xvi). Without the room to pursue this distinction further, I
will take his word for it.