d-m-c at worldnet.att.net wrote:
> >such as? i don't know of any self-declared sociologists who don't have a
> commitment
> >to a positivist or empiricist view - care to name some?
>
> There are a few: Norman Denzin, Steven Seidman, and some others whose
> names escape me at the moment.
i shoudl confess there has been for snme time now an unwritten distinction between those who define/describe themselves as sociologists, and those who define/describe themselves as social theorists in australia - the former are committed to the notion of social scientific practice and methodology (variously empiricist and positivist), the latter range from marxists, phenomenologists, pomos, etc. so the claim that sociologists were not positivists does not settle easily into the aust context. i don't know denzin or seidman. is this distinction not operative in the US, where i'm assuming (maybe wrongly) these guys are?
> >more importantly, exactly
> >what is this critique of positivism that logical positivists have made?
>
> Yes, i've quite forgotten all this stuff, it seemed so utterly irrelevant
> at them time; care to remind Jim?
i think jim may have meant that some positivists have a critique of empiricism. but since he doesn't say, i cannot know for sure.
> and wasn't Saussure trying to create a science out of semiotics.
> And honest to good red blooded Science?
yes, which is something that derrida more or less set his sights in teh esssay in 'writing and difference' if i recall correctly.
which kind of raises the point: to what extent are claims to scientificity rhetorical? jim clearly uses it rhetorically, althusser certainly did, though i suspect jim would claim his science is more scientific, et cetera... i don't have a problem with rhetoric, but the claim to scientific truths is more often than not a rhetorical flourish that tends to place one's interlocutors into the bin of the irrational at the same time that the claim to scientificity makes that particular move seem beyond reproach. what is at stake here is not knowledge or even truths, but the dismissal of opposing arguments - it's a political move that pretends to be above politics.
be well,
angela