Why Bea is Wrong, but Fly might be, too.

Bea's expert summary of Fly's book cuts right to the quick: the Dane is, quite certainly advocating a phronetic turn in the social sciences, one where the production of knowledge relies, as Bea writes, "heavily on learning or discovering through experience, as indicated in the Dreyfus model." But in her critique of this fundamental shift, elaborating on reasonable fears that the introduction of the normative is "potentially troubling," I think she shows an unwillingness to accept the analysis she so capably summarized. This isn't a horrible thing: the worlds of episteme and techne almost certainly have more jobs in them. But they also have phronesis, and should probably just admit it already.

This really seems the core of Fly's beef with Habermas, too, though, so I think Bea is certainly is excellent company. Marx, too. But the anecdote related on p.22, wherein Dreyfus admits that his project is to "undermine Western society," seems to become Fly's as well. If in the perfectly rational, endlessly deliberative world of which Habermas writes we can never surpass the achievment of competent or even proficient performers, then either 1) the world is condemned to be perpetually poorer, or 2) there must be something else, beyond the episteme and techne, worthy of being valued.

But Fly's reading of Foucault seems shockingly different from the usual, too -- so much so that I wonder if maybe he's not stretching beyond what the Frenchman really would agree too. In his concluding paragraphs on p.127 and 128, Fly makes the twin points that 1) because institutions based solely on episteme and techne can go horribly awry, phronesis must be privileged; and 2) that theories must be constantly be confronted with praxis to defend freedom. In both these concluding thoughts, I think Fly is probably seeing individuals as more self-determining than would Foucault, and to whatever extent his making a convincing argument relies on this reading of Foucault, I'd consider it suspect. That said, it doesn't really rely much, if at all; it'd be an odd sort of proposition if, in making this argument for phronesis, Fly expected us to accept it basedon the Foucault card, as some sort of episteme shorthand.

Fly Strikes Back

I thought it would helpful to start the discussion on Flyvjberg (Fly) by outlining some of the main concepts of Making Social Science Matter while Avi examines Fly’s interactions with his philosophical allies such as Foucault.

Bent Flyvbjerg: Professor, Aalborg University in Denmark

Main Argument: Argues for a new, non-natural science based social science paradigm. Recommends narrative case study method as a valid form of social science because of its particular focus on situation and context and because it brings in the preferences of the affected communities under study.
Philosophical allies: Aristotle (phronesis), Foucault (power dynamics), Nietzsche (incorporating knowledge to level of instinct)

The Contenders: Natural sciences (explanatory predictive theory) versus Social sciences (reflexive, discussion of values and interests)

“Science Wars”: Sokal’s Hoax and The Return of the NORC.
· Uses two incidents (debate ensued over the US National Opinion Research Center study’s claim on a monopoly over understanding sexual practices in the US through survey data and a professor who opined over philosophical implications in recent physics studies and their effects on culture) to illustrate tension between natural sciences and social sciences
· Natural sciences are critical of the methods and value of contemporary social-science research. Social sciences have been held to the standard of the natural sciences, which is the discovery of knowledge that is universal, context-independent, and cumulative. By this standard, the social sciences at best are viewed as weak imitators of the natural sciences.
Flyvbjerg Strikes Back: Book seeks to reestablish an older, more realistic standard by which to redirect the social sciences and to bolster their credibility. He uses the Dreyfus Model of Learning to indicate how research should be conducted at the level of context-dependent intuition in which knowledge it internalized and not bound by a set of rules or procedures. Fly calls upon Foucault’s view of power and his genealogical methods in order to update phronesis to include ways of examining power in the social sciences.

Bring In The Greeks: 3 intellectual virtues
1) Episteme: universal, invariable, context-independent scientific knowledge (Socrates and Plato.)
2) Techne: practical, instrumental knowledge (technical)
3) Phronesis: a deliberative kind of value-centered, action-oriented knowledge without contemporary equivalent which Fly argues would provide a better framework for the study of social interactions because human behavior does deal in universal, predictable outcomes but rather context-specific situations. (Aristotle)

Fly presents the Aristolean concept of phronesis, or context-dependent research based on praxis as a way to free social science from the epistemological baggage of the natural sciences. I’d argue that a major strength of this approach is that it relies heavily on learning or discovering through experience, as indicated in the Dreyfus model. However, a potentially troubling aspect of this approach is its foundation in the aspect of phronesis which calls for the researcher to make normative judgments on the “good” or “bad”. Fly states “Phronesis thus concerns the analysis of values—‘the things that are good or bad for man’-as a point of departure for action (57). Specifically, on the case of Aalborg, Fly asks if the direction of democracy in Aalborg (who gains, who loses with the mechanisms of power) is desirable and what should be done (145). This sounds like what policy analyst would do but not a scholar (specifically in the realm of participatory action research). What implications does the phronetic approach have on scholarship?

Another perspective on the "special relationship"

In his Foreign Affairs article this month Lawrence Freedman has a very different take than Janice Bially Mattern on the origin and nature of the US-British "special relationship." Using the case study of the Falklands war he argues that the special relationship was mainly one-sided on the part of Britain and something it wanted that the US merely tolerated.

There are many similarities in his discussion of the British mindset prior to the onset of armed conflict and that of Mattern's description of the mindset prior to the nationalization of Suez- the taken for granted expectation that the US would support them, the surprise and chagrin, even betrayal, British officials felt when they discovered their most reliable ally was wavering between supporting Britain or a two-bit dictator. Freedman is the official historian of the Falklands campaign so one assumes he probably has pretty good access to materials, and probably better than Bially Mattern.

Freedman even mentions the Suez crisis, saying that British governments became "obsessed with the idea of a special relationship" (63), indicating a one-sided and this not mutually constituted identity. Although Freedman's article is 100% policy-driven, as Foreign Affairs is known for, throughout his explanations and discussions one sees echoes of Bially Mattern's ideas and interpretations. For example, he similarly attributes a central role to elites and the bureaucracy in constituting the special relationship in times of crises. His main point is about Iraq, of course, and the the importance of nuance and complexity during times of crises, even among the best of allies. So to address KSG's concern about practical applicability or real-world usefulness, this analyses of the Falklands and Iraq seems to demonstrate how one can apply Bially Mattern's general framework to a time of crisis in order to understand change and continuity. Of course, whether the fact that the two authors attribute different starting points to the special relationship is important remains. Anyway, thought this might be of interest given that we were just reading an extremely theoretical account of a very similar crisis is in the US-British special relationship.

The Power of Lo...er...Language

As a wee undergraduate at the American University of Beirut in the fall of 2000, I wrote a term paper about the United States’ relationship to Israel during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. My main argument was that the United States intervened in the conflict and deployed the U.S. Marines to Lebanon not so much because of materialist interests, but rather as a face saving operation – face saving for Israel, with whom the United States enjoyed ‘special relations,’ and which at the time was in the midst of its dirtiest and most unpopular war to that day.

In essence, I argued, “Israel was exposed to the world as behaving like a threatening Other, rather than as a ‘beacon of democracy,’ which was the official U.S. perception of its ally.” While this paper was seriously flawed in many ways (I seem to remember professor el-Khazen having no tolerance whatsoever for my pseudo-postmodern approach; I naively drew assumptions from postmodernism, constructivism, and even realism, and happily through them into a conceptual blender), it was brought back to my memory when reading Janice Bially Mattern.

What my professor took issue with, among other things, was my answer to the question of what the fundamental forces were that drove the United States to the assumption that it was in its interest to intervene in 1982. In the extension, the question becomes the same as that posed by Bially Mattern in Ordering International Politics: what are the sources of order in international politics? Should we attribute international order to power politics or common interests?

According to Bially Mattern, none of the above. Instead, we need to look to the processes of international identity formation, or ‘identity turns.’ According to Bially Mattern, this is where we find the sources of international order. In distinguishing between sources of international order and factors that contribute to international order, Bially Mattern purports to show that the material interests so often referred to as sources of international order, are in fact nothing more than contributing factors. Interestingly, she doesn’t dismiss the importance of materialist factors all together; there is still room for materialist factors in her view, but they are not capable of imposing order on disorder.

Unlike social constructivist approaches (read: Wendt), Bially Mattern’s “post-constructivist” approach assumes identity formation can take place during crises, thus making identity a possible source of order. Identity during crises, according to Bially Mattern, is produced and reproduced through a “power politics of identity,” rather than through persuasion and dialogue. This use of “representational force,” is a practice of “coercive force” through speech acts. “Representational force, more exactly, works by highlighting the intolerable incongruities and inconsistencies among the multiple, often overlapping identities that make up the rest of the victim’s subjectivity” (98). The victim is presented with a nonchoice, he can either do as he is told, or suffer an identity crisis through the exposure of his intrasubjective inconsistencies.

There are many interesting repercussions of Bially Mattern’s argument to discuss in class, some that even lend themselves to policy prescription! For instance, what does Bially Mattern’s argument mean for the Bush administration and its “global war on terror”? Perhaps it’s time for a nueva strategia por el Presidente Boosh, eh?

In addition, I have a general wondering regarding her choice of words; Bially Mattern consistently refers to international identity (or identity processes, she uses them interchangeably) as “a source” of international order, as opposed to “the source” of international order. Does that mean that there can be other sources of international order? If so, what could they be?

Conversational Realities

Shotter's Conversational Realities lays the claim that psychological and sociological realities are socially constructed, sustained and perpetuated by every day conversations. Using interdisciplinary analysis, and borrowing heavily from psychology, he focuses on the construction processes of the nature of "things" that we tend to talk about in our lives and the meaning they take on as a consequence of their construction and implication within ourselves. Shotter moves away from the forms of knowledge that exist outside of ourselves and delves deep into the third kind of knowing; the kind that involves "knowing from within" and one, in contrast to the other forms of knowledge which are disciplined and orderly, and sustained by systematic discourses, is disorderly and undisciplined. In essence, Shotter's analysis focuses on the sui generis, knowledge of its own kind rather than that which is theoretical or technical, and hence outside of ourselves.

The shift in Conversational Realities is from how we understand objects to how we understand each other given its concern with the dialogical version of what Shotter defines as social constructivism. He states: "my aim is to release psychology from its colonization by an ahistorical, asocial, instrumental, inidividualistic cognitivism...and to open it up for a more large-scale, participatory or dialogical form of research activity (p.9). His focus in particular is the rhetorical-responsive version of social constructivism which embodies practices, and our immediate, spontaneous ways of responding to each other's speech intertwined activities. Shotter argues that the conversational activities we engage in is not simply an activity; rather, they are foundational- our lives are in them and shaped by them and provide the basis for everything we do. given the dynamics of the rhetoric responsive version of social constructivism therefore, Conversational Realities focuses on not just how we constitute and reconstitute the common sense background in the context of which we communicate, but also how we make and and recreate ourselves in the process. This constant creation and recreation of selves and the interaction in conversations, Shotter points out is an attempt to coordinate our physical activities and costruct different kinds of living social relationships. It is these conversationally developed and developign relations and the events that take place within and between them that are critical, since they create the context for constructed social relations and lend them their meaning.

Two questions may be posed in trying to understand the essence of Conversational Realities:
a. first, is it possible, through the dialogical intercourse, to grasp the inner lives of individuals and their positioning as Shotter suggests?
b. wherein lies the similarities and divergence between Searle's understanding of the social construction of reality compared to Shotter's in the case both are discussing the construction of reality for the purpose of communication and legitmization of one's view and conceptualization of the world?
c. can nonverbal communication provide the same kind of interplay of socially constructed relationships as shotter ilustrates is conducted through nonverbal communication?