Full stop instead. You ignore what I say, assert things without reason, condescended to me, who am, for what is is worth, very much as much a trained social scientists and more of a social theorist than you, dismiss without argument two centuries of argument against the dogmatic position you maintain here, neglect the fact, know to you, that I have criticized in length at in print to the supposed fallacies you attribute to me about reduction,a topic on which I wrote a PhD dissertation and a number of papers, and you assert, in the face of a list of social theorists whose names I will not repeat again, as well as some specific concrete arguments that I offered here, that experience is not a "logically coherent" basis for social understanding. Tell it Hegel. I think we've exhausted this and you've pegged yourselves for the kind of thinker you are --arrogant, uninformed, and small. Sorry to have to use harsh words; I used to think you were a smart guy. Live and learn. I'm disappointed. Goodbye, Miles.
--- Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> >
> > And if one doesn't have the inside lived
> experience
> > and there is someone who does -- we can't ask the
> > ancient Greeks, because there aren't any, but
> > straights can ask gays, for example -- one has to
> be
> > very careful about dismissing the insider's
> appraisal
> > of your efforts at understanding what it's like.
> >
> > So Miles is worse than wrong to blow off Brian;
> he's
> > not only arrogant and condescending, he's
> willfully
> > ignoring vital evidence that is necessary to a
> grasp
> > of the issues he purports to be concerned with.
> And he
> > doesn't have the excused that he's a behaviorist
> and
> > doesn't believe in the lived dimension of life,
> which
> > would be a different sort of failing.
>
> This is the same confusion of psychology and
> sociology that you wandered
> into a few weeks ago. Psychology (e.g., subjective
> understanding of
> lived experience) cannot explain social facts. Full
> stop. Sure, to
> understand a person's lived experience, verstehen is
> crucial; however,
> if we want to understand social systems and social
> structure, knowing
> the psychological characteristics of the
> participants is just
> irrelevant. It's exactly analogous to saying that
> people are made of
> atoms, therefore any valid analysis of society must
> be based on physics.
> There are different levels of analysis here, and
> assuming we can
> understand the structure of society by analyzing
> subjective experience
> is the worst sort of category error (as Ryle might
> say).
>
> Wittgenstein is appropriate here, in a different way
> than you suggest.
> When Wittgenstein wants to analyze language, he does
> not accept the
> common-sense views of how language works (e.g., the
> "picture theory" of
> language). Instead, he ruthlessly rejected that
> common-sense view of
> language to get at a more interesting and thorough
> analysis of language
> use. The fact that his view of language conflicts
> with common sense is
> irrelevant to the validity of his claims.
>
> Again, I want to emphasize that I am not "blowing
> off Brian"; his own
> experience is important, and mutual empathy is a
> noble goal. However,
> subjective experience is not a logically coherent
> basis for
> understanding social relations. --And this just
> occurs to me: why is it
> an insult to claim that X is not a good tool for
> analyzing social
> relations? Sure, analyzing social relations is
> important, but there are
> many good things in the world that have nothing to
> do with that onerous
> task!
>
> Miles
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> >
> > I'm not saying that the insider's version has to
> be
> > accepted tout court. Obviously that would make no
> > sense. First, there is not one "insider's"
> version.
> > Gays, for example, range from Brian to Roy Cohn
> > (Joesph McCarthy's hatchetman, later a crooked New
> > York lawyer and fixer, a right wing goon) along a
> > couple of the many possible dimensions. Second,
> it's
> > not settled who counts as an "insider" of what.
> The
> > idea of a form of life is itself contested.
> Third,
> > almost all of here here, me included, believe in
> the
> > reality, in fact the pervasiveness, of ideology,
> the
> > sort of twisting of consciousness that can lead
> people
> > of embrace their own oppression, among other
> things,
> > and that can be a basis for a critique of a
> > self-conception of a lived experience. (One can go
> off
> > into Hegel here, but let's not and say we did.)
> >
> > Is empathy easy? Certainly not. Surely there is a
> > "natural" capacity for it, whatever exactly that
> > means, but there's a "natural" capacity to learn a
> > language, play chess, do higher mathematics, write
> > music -- that that means that we have inherit the
> > biology and psychology that allows us to do these
> > things. But that doesn't mean doing any of them is
> > easy or that doing any of them well isn't
> something
> > that, whether or not there's something like formal
> > training involved, nonetheless requires
> discipline,
> > effort, talent, and education.
> >
> > I actually think that the actual exercise of our
> > capacity for empathy is among the hardest things
> any
> > of us can do, in part because people are far more
> > complicated and intricate than just about anything
> > else, quantum mechanics is child's play in
> comparison;
> > but more deeply because it requires that we come
> out
> > of ourselves and pay attention to other people.
> >
> > Empathy requires that we overcome out own equally
> > natural selfishness, self-centeredness, solipsism,
> > fight out own assumptions that our assumptions are
> > right and natural, set aside our tendency to
> assume
> > that others are just like us and if not they are
> > stupid,. bad, immature, whatever.
> >
> > Most people never get near empathy (and there is
> solid
> > evidence that men are a lot worse at it than
> women,
> > btw). I don't hold myself up as any model; I am
> > desperately aware of my own failings and my
> relatively
> > recent occasional approaches to empathy, attained
> > rather late in life, have only underlined for me
> how
> > fragile and difficult it is.
> >
> > The extreme difficulty of empathy is one reason
> that
> > good accounts of other people are so rare, and the
> > relative paucity of good social science, history,
> > imaginative fiction, is evidence that empathy is
> > really hard.
> >
> > In a political context there is an added issue or
> a
> > different context. If we are talking about
> > understanding the experiences and action of our
> > potential allies or would be constituencies, we
> would
> > do well not to take them as mere objects of
> > explanation, like bugs under a microscope or even
> the
> > ancient Greeks, whom we can strive to explain but
> with
> > whom we cannot interact. Therefore respect and
> > humility is in order and the operative assumption
> is
> > that we are talking to agents who act and think
> for
> > themselves and who are no more or less entitled
> than
> > we to chip into any discussion of the terms of our
>
=== message truncated ===
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