Damning the middle road
To give you guys something slightly different to talk to/at/about, I will be drawing specific comments from 'Objectivity' which relate to a topic I know we've talked about - both informally and more formally - through a Weberian lens. Hopefully this is thought-provoking stuff; I will admit that I found these readings surprisingly vital, and look forward to talking more about them on Thursday.
To crack the ice with a diagram, then:
Weber says that the practice of taking the middle road has exactly no place in serious objective endeavor. His exact phrase, on page 58, is 'The Archiv will struggle relentlessly against the severe self-deception which asserts that through the synthesis of several party points of view, or by following a line between them, practical norms of scientific validity can be arrived at.' Now. this prompts me to think about what exactly the difference between the process of fusing multiple explanations in the practical/social and empirical/scientific spheres. So far, my thoughts:
In practical/social inquiry, which poses questions relating to 'what should/ought to be done' and which rests on value judgments in Weber's conception, I am reminded of Eraine's well-loved tripartite anthropological examination model: you overlay what people do, what they say, and what they say they do and examine the areas where these concur and seperate in order to make your point or reach whatever peice of understanding is sought. This is illustrated above, under Figure 2. Essentially, in this case, the three foci of analysis are three different 'party positions', and by excluding outliers (or marginalizing them to isolate/draw attention to them, whatever) you reach an aggregate 'truth.' The utility of middle road techniques is thus a function of the usefulness, in social/practical analysis of multiple points of covergence.
OK, now how is that different from scientific thought? I relate this to the use of multiple examinations of a particular phenomenon - to leave physics behind for a bit and talk about the less midlife crisis-y discipline of human biopathology, take the 18th and 19th century investigations which attempted to reach a 'truth' regarding the factual nature of cholera. In this case, illustrated by Figure 1. above, multiple positions - the output of chemical assays of blood composition, anatomical explorations of the state of the intestines, dietary analyses of pathogen intake, and so on, were useful not in terms of their overlap but in terms of successive inductive approximations of an overall shape, in this case the darker circle outlining all three smaller circles. So the point is less one of congruence of output than it is the meta-coherence of investigative boundaries. The 'aggregate' is not the zone of overlap, but the zone of exclusion.
Now, it appears that the existence of Grand Unified Theory studies in the natural but not the social sciences are a good example of this difference. In GUT, the sub-circles are entirely different branches of empirical natural science, and the larger truth which overlays and contains them all is being sought. In the social sciences, on the other hand, we rely on a pick-and-choose model: in the particular example of IR first theology, then international law, then economics, then anthropology/psychology/cultural studies are being plugged in to 'inform' our analyses, and we seek common ground rather than difference.
If I'm right, and I've understood ideal types correctly, then the reason why middle ground is not and should never be the focus of scientifically valid inquiry, and indeed why intellectual activists should be leery of having pretensions that they speak a universal 'truth' is precisely the inapplicability of ideal type construction to zone-of-exclusion analysis: i.e., that you cannot combine constructed, subjective, neatened-up, representative utopi-models into shapes which let you successivly approximate what is there.
Ideas?
To crack the ice with a diagram, then:
Weber says that the practice of taking the middle road has exactly no place in serious objective endeavor. His exact phrase, on page 58, is 'The Archiv will struggle relentlessly against the severe self-deception which asserts that through the synthesis of several party points of view, or by following a line between them, practical norms of scientific validity can be arrived at.' Now. this prompts me to think about what exactly the difference between the process of fusing multiple explanations in the practical/social and empirical/scientific spheres. So far, my thoughts:
In practical/social inquiry, which poses questions relating to 'what should/ought to be done' and which rests on value judgments in Weber's conception, I am reminded of Eraine's well-loved tripartite anthropological examination model: you overlay what people do, what they say, and what they say they do and examine the areas where these concur and seperate in order to make your point or reach whatever peice of understanding is sought. This is illustrated above, under Figure 2. Essentially, in this case, the three foci of analysis are three different 'party positions', and by excluding outliers (or marginalizing them to isolate/draw attention to them, whatever) you reach an aggregate 'truth.' The utility of middle road techniques is thus a function of the usefulness, in social/practical analysis of multiple points of covergence.
OK, now how is that different from scientific thought? I relate this to the use of multiple examinations of a particular phenomenon - to leave physics behind for a bit and talk about the less midlife crisis-y discipline of human biopathology, take the 18th and 19th century investigations which attempted to reach a 'truth' regarding the factual nature of cholera. In this case, illustrated by Figure 1. above, multiple positions - the output of chemical assays of blood composition, anatomical explorations of the state of the intestines, dietary analyses of pathogen intake, and so on, were useful not in terms of their overlap but in terms of successive inductive approximations of an overall shape, in this case the darker circle outlining all three smaller circles. So the point is less one of congruence of output than it is the meta-coherence of investigative boundaries. The 'aggregate' is not the zone of overlap, but the zone of exclusion.
Now, it appears that the existence of Grand Unified Theory studies in the natural but not the social sciences are a good example of this difference. In GUT, the sub-circles are entirely different branches of empirical natural science, and the larger truth which overlays and contains them all is being sought. In the social sciences, on the other hand, we rely on a pick-and-choose model: in the particular example of IR first theology, then international law, then economics, then anthropology/psychology/cultural studies are being plugged in to 'inform' our analyses, and we seek common ground rather than difference.
If I'm right, and I've understood ideal types correctly, then the reason why middle ground is not and should never be the focus of scientifically valid inquiry, and indeed why intellectual activists should be leery of having pretensions that they speak a universal 'truth' is precisely the inapplicability of ideal type construction to zone-of-exclusion analysis: i.e., that you cannot combine constructed, subjective, neatened-up, representative utopi-models into shapes which let you successivly approximate what is there.
Ideas?
posted by Pyrautomata at 10:36 PM
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