From: "Tobin Nellhaus" <nellhaus-AT-gwi.net> Subject: BHA: Re: Emergence Date: Thu, 16 Jul 1998 00:47:09 -0400 Hi Caroline-- I think this is an intriguing topic, and one that certainly raises steam in cultural theory circles. I'm not in a situation that allows me to engage discussion well, but a couple thoughts anyway. My first instinct is to ask you what exactly constitutes a psychological structure in this context. Otherwise we're going to have some difficulty, since (I think) a number of emergent powers can be seen as psychological *or* social, or both, depending on the perspective and aspects considered. For example, an enormous part of someone's psychology consists of representations, language, signs. But sign systems are largely (some would argue, completely) socially developed. It's partly for that reason that folks like Vygotsky, Voloshinov, Mead etc maintain that the self is fundamentally social. (Peirce and Bourdieu also fall into this group. And me, for whatever that's worth--well, now you know my bias.) I grant that certain "psychological" capabilities and requirements (e.g. the power of using language, sexual drives, and so forth) establish various possibilities and constraints upon what societies must do. But at the same time, obviously, what language someone speaks and what they actually say, and how (or even whether) they have sex, are conditioned to an important extent by the society in which they live. I'm also not certain to what extent the capabilities and requirements I mentioned are "psychological" rather than physiological dispositions given to us by our species' genetic makeup. So again, if we're to discuss whether psychological structures emerge from social structures or vice versa, we'll need to be very clear about what we're referring to. Or at least clearer than I am about it at the moment! I'm not convinced by your effort to use the distinction between the real and the actual to help distinguish the emergent levels. To my ears that either suggests that one set of structures is somehow "less real" than another, which courts all sorts of trouble; or confuses the (possibly hierarchical or dependent) relationships among entities which are nonetheless both real, with notion that real entities interact to produce the actual. I think social and psychological structures (whatever they may be) are equally real, and they interact to produce the actualities which we then experience (if we're present and paying attention). But determining which structures are "more basic" is a separate matter. To ride my particular hobbyhorse in public yet again, ideas are REAL. Their possession of causal powers makes them so. But that is *not* to say that ideas are the "most fundamental" reality, nor does it suggest that ideas emerge totally independent from materialities. Yet to say that ideas emerge on the basis of other (physical, biological, social) structures is not to say that ideas are merely actual. --- Tobin Nellhaus nellhaus-AT-gwi.net "Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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