Date: Mon, 23 Sep 1996 19:07:34 -0400 (EDT)
From: Andrew Wayne Austin <aaustin-AT-utkux.utcc.utk.edu>
Subject: Re: social ontology



This post is to state as clearly as possible the historical materialist/
realist position in contrast to the positivism (masquerading as realism) 
presented thus far on the channel. I am going to argue, therefore, from a
Marxian position (not orthodox Marxism). 

As human beings reproduce material life, they produce social reality.
Social reality is made up of a whole array of social products. One of
these social products is knowledge systems.

These knowledge systems are produced throughout the class structure. 
However, the knowledge systems that tend to dominate are those knowledge
systems propagated by the ruling class. They have this ability because
they generally control the various means of ideational production. 

That the specific content of the social production process is not
transhistorical or transcultural (I believe we all agree on the basic
premise of historical materialism), it logically follows that the specific
content of knowledge is not transhistorical or transcultural either.

Unfortunately, knowledge systems are the way we access reality. (We know
this to be true because we cannot know outside of knowledge - an obvious
contradiction.) If would therefore follow from the previous premise
regarding the emergence of knowledge from social production that any
knowledge system does not have the capacity to accurately reflect the
social reality of a culture from which it was not produced. Moreover, any
specific knowledge system is incapable of accurately reflecting the
manifold totality of the social formation from which it was produced. 

Since we must access reality through knowledge systems, then this charge
of epistemic fallacy falls victim to the same predator as absolute
idealism: realism. 

To naturalize a knowledge system is to lose objectivity. The bourgeois
scientist seeks to naturalize his ontology, to make transitory social
reality, one which serves the ruling circles, appear to be eternal. This
is why positivism is the dominant scientific knowledge system. Positivism
is uncritical of its epistemology, and therefore is not objective. It
recognizes the realities it constructs as a priori facts that it
discovers. Likewise, neoclassical thought slips into subjectivity to
justify its ideological predisposition toward the status quo. These are
all forms of idealism.

If we believe there is an hierarchy to knowledge systems, and that this
hierarchy determines for us which knowledge system we should select if we
wish to understand more truthfully general social reality, then we are
mired in a circular justificatory scheme which moves entirely on the level
of naive idealism. As I already asserted, this is tautological. It is,
therefore, invalid. 

The better method is to analyze social reality within a reflexive system
of historical materialism (and similar methods of social constructionism
and historicism which can be subsumed under the general Marxian project),
the only system which attempt to simultaneously locate its theory and
method (on a philosophical level, then, its ontology and epistemology) in
the social systems which it seeks to analyze, and in which it is
generated, i.e. social critique. "Marxian theory [is] self-reflexive and,
hence, historically specific: its analysis of the relation of theory and
society is such that it can, in an epistemologically consistent manner,
locate itself historically by means of the same categories with which it
analyzes its social context" (Moishe Postone, 1996). 

Andy