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> well now see, that wasn't the issue. sam seemed to be suggesting a rather
> positivist account of science: the logic of discovery is or should be
> absolutely distinct from (has no influence on) the logic of justification
> and both should be distinct from the logic of political practice. in other
> words, if only the right procedures are used to heighten the scientist's
> objectivity, then we can produce increasingly objective accounts of the
> social.
The logic of discovery should be independant of the logic of justification, but is it? I think Kuhn and Hanson refuted the idea that there is a logic of discovery. Science as it is actually practiced is more messy. It relies on intangibles like intuition, guess work. I think the logic of discovery can be weakened into a claim about convergence. Convergence is where two or more people come to the same conclusion independantly. The paradigm example would be Descartes and Leibniz both discovering (not inventing) the calculus at the same time.
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> sam also seems to be arguing for naturalism: a unity between the methods
> of the natural and social sciences, whether he supports reductionism or
> scientism or something else i'm not yet sure.
Yes, but I do not support reductionism. I've argued against it on these lists before. I'm trying to defend scientific realism, naturalism, non-reductionism and Marxism at the same time, though I suspect I'm not doing a very good job. To lapse into jargon, realism is different than positivism in that positivism because of its verificationism, does not believe that entities which cannot be immedietely sensed exist. I believe in explanatory unification i.e. a maximal amount of properties can be exlained by a minimal amount of theory.
Humans are a part of the natural world so why not study them naturalistically? However, naturalism may not explain all of the social world satisfactorily for various reasons.
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> the criticism you've offered Yoshie are important, but i find that it's
> not nearly powerful enough to reject neopositivist and interpretive
> epsitemologies/ontologies. i want a stronger critique. so, while sam
> suggests that we simply have to keep tryin' in order to get closer to the
> truth,
Yes, convergence. Isn't that the way science is actually practiced. Trial and error, intuition, experiment, guessing etc. until one gets a better and better theory which, presumably, is true description of reality?
> this reads to me as merely an epistemological claim.
Yes it is an epistemological claim. The problem with claiming that the ontological and epistemological are interdependant (social construcitonism) is conceptual confusion and slipping in to a form of idealism or relativism.Constructionists believe that reality exists in least in part on the way the perceiver perceives it. It is your *knowledge* of reality that is theory dependant, infused with values etc. not reality itself. You do not need to claim that ontology and epistemology are interdependant to keep your claims about the sociology of knowledge.
Sam Pawlett