> i often don't understand your particular specialist language Ian. What are
> you talking about when you use the word "independence" and "stories of
> independence"?
>
> shag
==============
1st example: the everyday use of the term in, say, claims of the independence of central banks -- demolished by, among others, Matthew Watson in 'The Institutional Paradoxes of Monetary Orthodoxy: Reflections on the Political Economy of Central Bank Independence', Review of International Political Economy, 9 (1), 2002, 183-196. The ridiculousness of the claim is now apparent to to just about every adult on the planet with access to a newspaper, television or internet connection and has a modicum of education.
2nd example: the paradoxes of claims of independence in some schools of moral epistemology which presuppose realism; to wit "the truth of the wrongfulness of abortion is independent of any possible proof we could give for the claim -- i.e. a moralist's version of a typical maneuver in defense of alethic realism; truth outruns proof. One need only causally peruse the various schools of post, or rather, non realist thinking about moralese to identify the staggering number of problems associated with the approach.
Miles claim suffers casually from fallacies of composition and fallacies of subtraction/division; it is a sorites problem. That it is a sorites problem does not entail methodological or ontological individualism. I can provide refs. on request but the last thing you need is more texts to look at :-)
Interdependencies abound.
Ian