File spoon-archives/bourdieu.archive/bourdieu_2000/bourdieu.0006, message 23


From: "Simon Beesley" <simonb-AT-beesleys.freeserve.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Bourdieu and Objectivity
Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 09:10:57 +0100


Kent,

For the sake of the argument, I will even concede that there may be some sense
in talking of habitus as a set of dispositions. Nevertheless, my questions still
hold. How do you induce a set of dispositions? How do you transmit a habitus?
Surely, in Bourdieu's conception, habitus is a given, a social given.

I will go further. I will even concede that it is possible for a system of
dispositions to be transmitted and produced. The question now is: How can the
Bourdieusian system of dispositions generate the production of scientific truth?
Is it the embodied equivalent of scientific method? If so, what is Bourdieu's
concept of scientific method? Is it just contingent that this particular set of
embodied dispositions happen to lead to the production of scientific truths?
What are these dispositions? Could we program a computer to follow them? Doesn't
the Bourdieu's conception of scientific method -- now unconscious and
embodied -- reduce to the idea of a mechanical system for generating scientific
truth?

Further still. I will even concede that the Bourdieusian system of dispositions,
once transmitted and produced, will lead to the production of scientific truths
(by all to whom the system has been transmitted). The questions now are: Were
all previous sociological truths the product of this same system? Do other
sciences rely on similar systems of dispositions? In what way does the
physicist's system of disposition differ from the Bourdieusian system? ... and
so on, in the same vein as my two earlier posts on this topic.

Regards
Simon


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