>So Kel was right: NC doesn't know what he's talking
>about here. There are no well tested and verified
>theories about "human affairs"?! For Noam, the fields
>of psychology, sociology, and anthropology apparently
>do not exist, and theories in these fields supported
>by hundreds if not thousands of studies do not exist.
>Man, he needs to get out more.
Well, to be fair to The C, some sociologists also say that no one has produced "real" social theory, either. You've heard that sociologists have physics-envy, right? :) According to these folks, we haven't produced the sort of Covering Law or hypotehtico-deductive theory that is supposed to dominate the nat. sciences: to explain something is to provide a justifiable account of necessary causes and essential determinants based on universal laws that operate under specific conditions. (that's where probability comes into play; see end of post) Now, of course, that's pretty much what Chomsky was saying in that one quote CG pointed to. It is amusing, though, that because he used "plain language" it wasn't at all clear exactly what he meant. :)
Anyway, while there are some particular, substantive theories that might fit the bill, there isn't a larger, more encompassing and (key) parsimonious theory that covers a broader class of phenom. There are some attempts to do so, such as Jonathan Turner's list that I mentioned earlier.
The C man seems to be saying that the way natural phenom are theorized is different from the way social phenom are. What I'm not sure about is why this is so. Is it:
ontological (the natural and social worlds are two fundamentally different kinds of things)?
epistemological (similar or different, doesn't matter. because we're human, we influence the social world in ways that we don't the natural world, so we can never quite achieve a thoroughly objective account of it -- although there are other positions that would be characterized somewhat different)?
or both?
I can't decide based upon what has been claimed here. Jim?
What he's saying is, "since non-natural science theorists can't describe what they're theorizing clearly, then there must not be anything actually there to theorize on _his_ understanding of theory. It's vaporware! Never mind, of course, the various social theorists who've argued that the covering law model of science is limited and there may be more than one way to do theory and still be explanatory theory. A few that come to mind are Michael Burawoy in _Ethnography Unbound_ (very clear), Richard Bernstein in _Beyond Objectivism and Relativism_, Brian Fay in _Social Theory and Political Practice_ (gawd, you could get more clear!), and Raymond Morrow's _Critical Theory and Methodology_
If C.G. is right, and there's not more to the story, I find this very indirect evidence upon which to base such a claim--though I'm sure he could, *chuckle*, provide a better account of his reasoning if given more time.
Oh, and I was talking to a colleague yesterday and he says he went to a talk by the C man where he said that "It's all one big mystery and if we happen upon theories that manage to accurately represent reality it's pretty much a happy accident." If that's true--and I take it with a grain of salt because it's just hearsay--then I'm not sure why he appears to make a distinction between nat and soc worlds. Unless he's basically saying that his is an epistemological position on naturalism.
Kelley
Li (one or more universal laws)
Ci (one or more statements of background circumstances)
======= (deductively entails)
E (statement of the fact or regularity to be explained)
Because not all scientific explanations are universal, logicians have employed inductive-statistical models that utilize probabilistic statements:
Li (one or more statitical laws)
Ci (one or more statements of background circumstances)
======= (makes very likely)
E (statement of the fact or regularity to be explained)