>
>talking about commonsense notions and theory, paul churchland, in
>defense of his eliminative materialism, goes to great length to
>[attempt to] establish that commonsense/folk-psychology is indeed
>a theory. a good summary of his argument can be found at:
>
>http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/folkpsych-theory/
>http://cognet.mit.edu/MITECS/Entry/baker
>
>of course this is a bit different from the current discussion of
>sociological theories that go beyond a "theory of mind".
>
>this is a good paper if you can get your hands on it:
>
>
>Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes
> Journal of Philosophy, 78, no. 2, February 198l
>
It's also in his collection of papers, I forget the title. Also good is Terry Horgan's and John Woodward's reply, "Folk Psychology is Here to Stay."
The papers are directly on point, as we say in the law biz. But I do think that Chomsky is working with the a sort of Davidsonian conception of theory on which a theoey worthy of the name has to offer not merely rough, ceteris paribus predictions and post-facto rationalizing explanations, but also precise, preferably quantifiable predictions that are testible to within several decimal places and exactly stated laws that are exceptionless or probabilitistic in a precise sense, like quantum mechanical laws.
The problem with this model is that on it, there's a lot of science that has no theories: evolutionary biology, metereology, fluid dynamics (though that may be changing with new developments), etc. From our point of view, I think we can say that social scientific theories like Marx's and Weber's are theories in the sense that they offer a framework for undeerstanding, identification of the basic entities in the realm to be explained and their nature and tendencies, and rough predictioons about their behavior under specified circumstances. More than that you are unlikely to get in the realm of social behavior. I myself doubt the existence of social scientific "laws," as opposed to generalizations that state tendencies (like the falling rate of profit).
Btw, the quote someone posted a while ago suggested that Chomsky thuinks that abstract models, like Marx's account of capital in Capital, are theories, although that doesn't say what he thinks about historical materialism, the theory of ideology, and the like. So maybe Chomsky's criteria are a bit less rigorous than I've said here. I still think that Chomsky's own operative theory is vulgar Marxism.
jks
_________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp.