File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2000/bhaskar.0002, message 47


From: "Tobin Nellhaus" <nellhaus-AT-gis.net>
Subject: Re: BHA: Re: How is New York Today-  fate of [Social Science]?
Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 17:40:03 -0500


Hi Colin--

Nice to hear from you!  I think your points are pretty much on the mark: I
definitely concur about the relational and contextual aspects, and that
transitivity is social and does not consist simply of thoughts.  (And yes, I
was using an individual thought merely as an example, not as the essence of
transitivity.)  I'm not so sure about this statement though:

>        However, what I think he was wanting to get away
> from was the subject/object sense of the two domains Tobin alludes to.

I'm hesitant to directly apply "subject" and "object" to the TD and ID
myself (hence the scare quotes in my discussion before).  But I'm not
certain that's wrong either.  I think he was more trying to avoid the terms
"subjective" and "objective," with all the baggage they drag around.  Part
of the problem with those terms would be confusion over how to treat
thoughts, because in some theories thoughts are always subjective, and for
RB they can be objects of analysis.  So maybe the idea was to find terms
that hadn't been mined in so many different and conflicting ways.  A nice
explanatory footnote would have been handy though.  --Actually, in the
glossary to DPF, he says "The intransitive dimension is initially the domain
of the objects of scientific knowledge," which more or less clarifies the
"object" issue (he then extends the concept to whatever is existentially
intransitive, even if unknowable).

My sense is that if this is the correct way to interpret the TD/ID
distinction, then there's no question of social or cultural entities being
quasi-intransitive (or quasi-transitive, for that matter)--anyway not in
RB's analysis.  There is a necessary time lag between theories about society
and social transformations that such theories may cause.  Even individual
self-reflection requires taking oneself as an object of thought, even if
momentarily, in order to change oneself (or one's behavior) subsequently,
even if it's milliseconds later.  This time-lag is a key part of RB's
argument in DPF about society, and it's crucial to Archer's theories.

On the other hand, I seem to recall that as a grammatical construct, the
subject/object distinction doesn't occur in all languages (and since the
terms "transitive" and "intransitive" come from linguistics, this is a
significant source of questions).  So maybe this needs to be probed further.

---
Tobin Nellhaus
nellhaus-AT-mail.com
"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce





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