--- snitsnat <snitilicious at tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
> At 04:41 PM 6/16/2005, Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
>
>
> >and there's the positivism! :)
>
> I realize you have a smilie-con there, but i don't
> get it? i'm not a
> positivist. i quoted a positivist-naturalist who
> believes that we can
> create a science of everything, with physics at the
> foundation, and each
> branch of the sciences capable of telling us, in
> law-like fashion, about
> how this "everything" works. (that's put too simply)
> Now, if even a guy who
> takes as his model of science, physics, can say that
> humanities are
> sciences, then....
Leaving out the "law-like fashion" -- because I don't think explanation has to be by means of laws -- I don't think this is a crazy idea. 15 years ago I wrote a dissertation defending it, which I supposed makes me a God-damned Logicla Positivist -- although I think of myself as a pragmatist. I don't really care anymore whether science is unified in this way, but I will state for the record that I never ran into a good argument that it couldn't be -- that's what the 410 page diss in 10 point type was about, knocking down bad arguments aganst reductionism and the unity of science. (After 200 or so pages my advisors starting to suggest that I could stop now . . . )
But I was a philosopher, not a sociologist. Thought maybe I am a lawyer and not a philosopher any more because I was too much of a sociologist/political scientist and not enough of a philosopher.
> I had a mentor who always told us to ask of a text:
> "What's the author
> afraid of?"
>
> Well Comte and others who founded the social
> sciences were afraid of social
> disorder --
I like that question and that approach. The logical positivists in the 1920s and 30s were mostly pretty radical leftists, and the emigres to the US stayed at least on the Social Democratic left. What were they afarid of? Well, by the 30s, fascism. In the 20s, hmm, takes some thought.
in the same way the debates over the
> origin of value terrified
> people who grappled with that question. If there is
> nothing concrete that
> determines value, what could it possibly be
> determined by that wasn't
> shifting, amorphous, fleeting (and underneath that
> obvious terror was the
> less obvious terror: if there's nothing concrete we
> can point to, won't
> society fall apart?)
Well, you might have a different woryy, which was waht drove me to write about relativism is value and knowledge, and that's, why do we think that we (on the left) are right, i.e., that our views are correct, in the face of overwhelming rejection by their intended audience and the apparent wreck of all our hopes?
>
> So the people who'd eventually come to be called the
> founders of the social
> sciences were terrified that social cohesion would
> be lost if there were no
> feudally ordered society upon which to base
> everything.
Isn't Marx one of those Founders? And Weber knew that feudally ordered society was on its way out and thought that choice of values was arbitrary.
jks
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