de son seul fait

07:20 Dec 31, 2012 

no doubt, anthropomorphism is a pretty neat trick, for the sake of philosophical reasoning, literary niceties, or blockbuster animation movies. As I pointed out earlier, it is up to the OP to decide based on context whether that is something that would work for this particular text. I would personally also stick to the original sentence in which the subject is the use of paradigm, not the paradigm itself.

09:16 Dec 28, 2012 

I'm sorry that I didn't address your comment about agency. FWIW, people do speak of paradigms with active verbs, as if they are doing something:

http://cambridgeinterfaithonline.org/en/resources/papers/dee... :
"This can be because a strong doctrinal paradigm acts to pre-empt a sustained attentiveness to the possibilities and nuances of a text..."

http://www.ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/article/view/293/31... :
"This distributive paradigm acts to restrict the scope of the high-tech equity agenda because..."

http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/articles/pdf/v20/20HarvJLTech403... (p. 412) :
"The United Nations Charter and customary international law both govern the use of force by states and form the basis of the current jus ad bellum paradigm.71 This paradigm prohibits the use or threat of force, except in limited circumstances."

http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/icsi/events/2011/09/13/speech_l... :
"The Socratic Paradigm prescribes that we should re-examine every assumption..."

I'm not sure this usage attributes agency a paradigm (or its use). But I do think it's a bit different than speaking of inexorable, factual consequences.

07:46 Dec 28, 2012 

I think "de son seul fait" absolutely requires agency. In theory, this could be the agency of the one who uses the paradigm, but the syntax seems to indicate that the focus here is on the use of paradigm itself.

Then the question is: can the act of using a paradigm have a volition, make choices, and act with intended consequences or is the act of using a paradigm simply a fact with factual consequences such as "mak[ing] the continuation of division possible, as well as the pursuit of dialectical research that is taken up in the Statesman" ?

Or, to put it another way, can the use of paradigm be like a bénévole or Marisol Touraine and act "de son seul fait"? It's an option to consider, especially if the larger context of the original quote follows that line of thought. But my guess (just a guess) is that this is not the case.

07:10 Dec 28, 2012 

I was attempting to distinguish between "de ce fait même" (ipso facto) and "de son seul fait," if that is a meaningful distinction to be drawn.

To that end, I was thinking it could be useful to differentiate between something that occurs by necessity and something that occurs by its own inherent means. I'm not sure those two cases are the same, philosophically speaking.

Perhaps it could be stated as follows:
Does the author mean that "use of the paradigm" will not inevitably produce specific effects?
Does the author mean that "use of the paradigm" has effects that are not attributable to the paradigm itself as such?
Those seem like two different ideas to me.

In any case, it's difficult to know the author's intended meaning without reading the whole article, so I'm not sure that "ipso facto," even with its possible implications of necessity, would not be a suitable translation.