October 11, 2020:

She's incapable of cottoning-on to the difference between Althusser's objectivist "problematic" and Kuhn's subjectivist "paradigm".

Why? Of all possible difficulties this is certainly among the most straightforward.

Ultimately it's because her intellectual formation is a run-of-the-mill idealization of consciousness, exactly as you'd expect from her Marin County milieu of well-off hippy stereotypes. So firmly established cortextually that she's unable even to think ideas which do not privilege consciousness as the ground of reality.

This is why she understands history as an unbroken continuum of upward progress. For her, "progress" is a teleology of enlightenment, a grandiose shorthand for improved consciousness. History is the sky-grasping arc of improvements to understanding, where people become more just, more democratic, more humane, more peaceful, a narrative in which scientific discovery for example is less about Hiroshima than, say, microwave ovens. It's unproblematicized, straightforward, non-complex. History is the triumph of reason, it's the rise of consciousness toward self- and mutual understanding, inscribed in capitalism, itself the materialized narrative of improvement, a kind of filigree within reality, to the extent materiality matters.

It's why she believes the movement against the Vietnam war was the first mass antiwar mobilization. It has to be. If it has precedents it no longer illustrates the elevation of progress.

She understands "paradigm", because that's shorthand for the way individuals think. She cannot grasp "problematic" because that's independent of individuals — it can even be said to be the cause of individuals — and is independent of consciousness. To her that's some sort of non sequitur. There can't be anything outside of consciousness. Consciousness is what history means.

Thus she reproduces in her own consciousness a specific constellation of problematics which of course pre-exist her and which drive her decisions without her awareness. Positivism, primarily. But also the Marin County milieu of well-off hippy stereotypes, which she personifies, proudly, without apology.