Sociology does not name any object of study. Sociology a) offers no difficulty and b) does not exist outside of specific situations. It is as silly to study sociology as it is to study shirts-with-one-button-missing or junk-yard-objects.
<insert your favourite discipline here>
>2) There is no need to eliminate lexical duplication except when it is
>not a duplication, and under the pretense of a new name an old object of
>study is hidden.
So, one thought, one expression? To hell with the poets, let me eat my diction in peace. No wonder you don't think communication is an 'object' (???!!!!????) of study. You're a nihilist.
> As an empirical observation I would say that no one
>ever uses the term "social cosntruction" except with the more or less
>deliberate intention of confusing the topic being discussed.
I'd like some evidence for that one.
>To repeat an earlier point. Later ages will look back on the 20th
>century's obsession with language, symbol systems, semantics, etc. as
>being even dippier than neoclassical economics. One symptom of this is
>that when the obsession is challenged, it is defended in one of the
>three following ways:
>
>a) The challenge is caricatured ("materialism of fools")
>
>b) The challenger is told: you're just saying what we're saying. (This
>reply, in which Kelley specialized, is an implicit admission that
>Habermas had nothing to say but merely to repeat trivialities.)
Sigh (of the unrecognized creature). Carrol, even you can acknowledge the importance of mutual recognition for the well-being and integrity of a human being. The mother-infant relationship, to name of field that has been woefully understudied, is a social relation - it is one of mimesis, mirroring, excitement, frustration and everything else. Without understanding how human beings communicate, we can have know understanding of what we are doing - ie. how to communicate. It is essential that we outline notions of grammar, outline what 'mirroring the other' is, to spell out the effects of playing with one another. Communication constitutes what can be called the bonds of love. Equally important is the way in which domination comes to be internalized *through* these relations. Your cracks about neuroscience are ridiculous when one considers sadomasochism in everyday life: why is it that one derives enjoyment from compliance, why is it that another derives enjoyment from being a dominator. Your neuroscience says nothing about this because it does not grasp the performative dimension, which is encapsulated in linguistic or communicative theory. You're simply wrong about this communications stuff. Sure, it is overemphasized at the expense (sometimes) of other elements of our sociation... but language is the medium of the coordination of our activity. You're engaged in it right now. I don't see how you can deny this why using it at the same time. Explain Hegel's lord and bondage dialectic without a notion of consciousness, what is there to understand about human relations from The Story of O?
Damn, I wish I'd defined "lifeworld" for you. Is this what this is all about?
ken