The Practicality of Particularism?
During class, we raised, but did not answer, the question: what are the implications of Shotter’s exposition for social science research? Tatiana, Ela, and Efe all touched on this in their blog posts in different ways:
I am first going to pretend that I accept Shotter’s argument 100%. If we accept this argument, meaning is entirely contingent, each “meeting” (encounter of any kind between two living things) is unique, and so on. What, then, can social science—or we can even change the term to social research or social theory—do? It seems to me that it becomes utterly impossible. We cannot generalize, we cannot categorize (as Efe argues we otherwise can), and we cannot say anything general about how humans interact except that it is always unique, always fresh, always another “first time.” We could sit in a public place and listen and look voyeuristically at individual encounters, but we could not even write up our notes—we would be missing all the visceral elements that Shotter finds so central. It seems all we could do, as Ela suggests, is to write literature—poetry, drama, novels, films. Is Shotter proposing the end of social science (or social research or social theory)? Did he climb that ladder only to kick it away?
Somehow I do not imagine so. What if we understood his work differently—if we understood it as a plea to social studies (if you will) to merely inch away from general theories, away from Cartesian mind-body dualism, away from language-as-stable-meanings? Does he really mean that language has no stable, external meanings, or merely that we have given it too much credit for doing so? Does he really mean that one social encounter bears no resemblance to another? I think not—only that there is less resemblance than we might assume. His argument might be read, then, as a critique of social science, an argument in favor of acknowledging more contingency of meaning, more mind-body unity, and more uniqueness of each social situation.
With this modified interpretation of Shotter in mind, NOW what are the implications of his writings? Maybe the best that comes out of it, as Tatiana points out, is that “I might understand myself better, and how I interact in the social world, or even how others interact differently based on the vocabulary and values we assume.” Is that enough? As Tatiana continues, “but how does that translate to research and knowledge that others can find valuable?”
I am (relative to others in the academic setting) a very practical person. I enjoy asking questions like the following: How do we eliminate large-scale violent conflict? How do we eliminate poverty? How do we improve governance and promote democracy? If we accept Shotter in the modified way I suggested, not as meaning what he says literally but meaning it relatively to the rest of the social science literature, then the implications for practice are rather interesting. We would ask, not, “How do we eliminate large-scale violent conflict?” but rather “How do we eliminate this particular large-scale violent conflict?” We would not ask, “How do we eliminate poverty?” bur rather “How do we eliminate poverty in this particular place and time?” Not “How do we improve governance and promote democracy?” but “How do we improve this particular piece of this particular government, or how do we help this piece of government become more transparent to and inclusive of this particular population?” We would be compelled to go and look and listen and absorb at least a bit of the richness, the uniqueness, and the ever-evolving nature of the particular population involved in a particular time and place before acting.
I, for one, am not interested in abandoning all search for general answers to the more general questions posed above. It seems to me, however, that if practitioners asked themselves these more particular questions, we might end up with solutions that are more practical, more responsive, more respectful of the wisdom of local populations, and less imposed from on high, less expert-driven, and less, perhaps, imperialistic. I still feel that one can indeed generalize across cases and develop explanatory theories that can be utilized in practice, but I see how Shotter’s view of the world can help us hold our theories (and resulting interventions) with an appropriate level of humility.