Date: Wed, 16 Sep 1998 11:08:02 -0700 (PDT)
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: RE: Sociology or epistemology?


At 04:25 PM 9/15/98 +0300, j laari wrote:
>  I find him
>exceptionally clear materialist. Therefore I don't think pursuing the
>issue is worth of bandwidth.  (Well, there's of course always the
>question concerning the concept of materialism lurking behind the next
>corner...) On the other hand there are folks who are studying the
>basics and desperately trying to find out what the hell 'materialism'
>really means. 

Jukka, is it possible that people are getting confused over the relationship
between ontological materialism and historical materialism?  This is what
people used to fight over in all the Engels-betrayed-Marx debates.  You
know, that Marx didn't particularly care about matter as an ontological
category in the manner of dialectical materialism, that his materialism was
strictly sociological, etc. This is baloney, by the way, but I think such
debates are fruitless because when you press your reasoning far enough, it
seems to me you can't be a historical materialism without being an
ontological materialist, but then you don't have too spend too much time
fleshing out your ontological materialism if you wish to concentrate your
attention on historical materialism.

>My
>interruption was based on idea that expressions such as "materialist
>sociology" or "sociological epistemology" (despite the fact that I
>have used them, too, and probably will use them in contexts where I
>can't grant that everyone knows exactly the specific phil. nature of,
>say, epistemology or materialism) might be confusing, because they
>combine philosophical threads or disciplines with sociology. Thereby
>the differences between phil. and soc.  tend to be wiped out and the
>result wouldn't be particularly enlightening for anyone.

This makes me think of the Bhaskar list for some reason.  One can spend so
much time trying to get the logical microfoundations right for the
ontological status of society viz. the individual, the Transformational
Model of Social Action, etc. etc., that one never substantively develops a
social theory.  Just like structure and agency, these microfoundations have
a place in the scheme of things, but if one spent one's entire life getting
them right, one would never progress onward to substantive social theory.

>PB's and his forerunners' work on the concepts of
>habitus and field has been important in bringing (theoretically,
>conceptually) together the basic threads of human individual and of
>more or less immediate social world where he/she acts ("field"). It's
>economic and powerful effort.

Agreed!
 

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