From: Hans Ehrbar <econ-AT-lists.econ.utah.edu> Subject: pon3-20 Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2001 15:50:00 -0700 *{PON3:25} Chapter 2: Societies* *Introduction* What properties do societies possess that might make them possible objects of knowledge for us? My strategy in developing an answer to this question will be effectively based on a pincer movement. But in deploying the pincer I shall concentrate first on the ontological question of the properties that societies possess, before shifting to the epistemological question of how these properties make them possible objects of knowledge for us. This is not an arbitrary order of development. It reflects the condition that, for transcendental realism, it is the nature of objects that determines their cognitive possibilities for us; that, in nature, it is humanity that is contingent and knowledge, so to speak, accidental. Thus it is because sticks and stones are solid that they can be picked up and thrown, not because they can be picked up and thrown that they are solid (though that they can be handled in this sort of way may be a contingently necessary condition for our knowledge of their solidity).^1 In the next section I argue that societies are irreducible to people and in the third section I sketch a model of their connection. In that and the following section I argue that social forms are a necessary condition for any intentional act, that their pre-existence establishes their autonomy as possible objects of scientific investigation and that their causal power establishes their reality. The pre-existence of social forms will be seen to entail a transformational model of social activity, from which a number of ontological limits on any possible naturalism can be immediately derived. In the fifth section I show how it is, just in virtue of these emergent features of societies, that social science is possible; and I relate two other types of limit on naturalism (viz. epistemological and relational ones) back to the fundamental properties of the transformational model itself. In the last section I use the results established in the previous section to generate a critique of the traditional fact/value dichotomy; and in an appendix to the chapter I illustrate the notion of social science as critique in the reconstruction of an essentially Marxian concept of ideology. Now it is important to note that because the causal power of {PON3:26} social forms is mediated through human agency, my argument can only be formally completed when the causal status of human agency is itself vindicated. This is accomplished in Chapter 3 in the course of a parallel demonstration of the possibility of naturalism in the domain of the psychological sciences. The transformational model of social activity developed here will be seen to entail a relational conception of the subject-matter of social science. On this conception `society does not consist of individuals [or, we might add, groups], but expresses the sum of the relations within which individuals [and groups] stand'.^2 And the essential movement of scientific theory will be seen to consist in the movement from the manifest phenomena of social life, as conceptualized in the experience of the social agents concerned, to the essential relations that necessitate them. Of such relations the agents involved may or may not be aware. Now it is through the capacity of social science to illuminate such relations that it may come to be `emancipatory'. But the emancipatory potential of social science is contingent upon, and entirely a consequence of, its contextual explanatory power. 1. See A Realist Theory of Science, 1st edn (Leeds 1975), 2nd edn (Hassocks and New Jersey 1978), esp. ch. 1 sec. 4. (p. 25) --- from list seminar-14-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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