tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post6654792424542569998..comments2024-03-23T04:01:39.348-04:00Comments on Understanding Society: Realism about social entitiesDan Littlehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-89626315140564612652022-04-20T16:36:20.566-04:002022-04-20T16:36:20.566-04:00Yufan, thank you for your thoughtful comment and q...Yufan, thank you for your thoughtful comment and question. The immediate impulse towards the thinking in this post came out of the seminar I'm teaching now, along with some puzzles about Bhaskar's assumptions. The basic question in my mind is this: what are the minimal commitments that a "social realist" must make about the social world? Does realism require commitment to a wide range of social entities at a variety of levels, or is it enough to be realist about the circumstances, mechanisms, actions, and social relations of the social actors who make up the social world? What is the line between "transitive" and "intransitive" things, in Bhaskar's terms? If X's are real, and Y's are composed of X's, does that imply that Y's are real existing entities as well? Consider the ontology of evolutionary biology. We have the mechanisms of natural selection, genotype and phenotypes of organisms, competition for reproduction within an environment, ... But are we justified in asserting the reality of the local ecology in which evolutionary processes unfold? Or is the idea of an ecology simply an umbrella term for encompassing an open-ended set of environmental conditions and resources in an open-ended region of space? Is the idea of the "ecology" in which the finches of the Galapagos just a convenient way for biologists to refer to more concrete items of interest in the evolutionary process? When we theorize about local ecologies, we have fairly specific ideas in mind about the systemic interconnections that exist among the species, food sources, climate conditions, vegetation, disease vectors, ... , that are co-present and that jointly influence the reproductive success of variant individuals; but notice how open-ended that list is. So I would be inclined to argue that we shouldn't reify the idea of an ecology, but rather keep in mind always the component processes and mechanisms that it encompasses. Dan Littlehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-59562628904231056702022-04-20T10:51:06.873-04:002022-04-20T10:51:06.873-04:00Jim, thanks for your reflections about this topic....Jim, thanks for your reflections about this topic. I'm not sure I agree about the portability of this "agnosticism" to the natural sciences. A protein model is a complex chemical structure that can be investigated through a variety of research techniques in physics and chemistry; and it is reasonably stable over medium periods of time. There is the interesting complication that a protein can sometimes "fold" in multiple ways, giving it different chemical/physical properties. But even these variants are stable and explicable. I suppose that a critical realist might say that the position I'm trying out here gives up too much "social ontology" and places the ontological action at the level of actors and their relations; so it is too close to methodological individualism for their comfort. But I feel this position preserves "social realism" in a very specific sense: social facts exist independent of the mental frameworks of the investigator (which is the criterion of Bhaskar's distinction between transitive and intransitive entities).<br />Dan Littlehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15953897221283103880noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-45063513763935999882022-04-20T07:30:52.505-04:002022-04-20T07:30:52.505-04:00Real objective features of the social world change...Real objective features of the social world change. This is a foundation of my thesis on contextual reality---a work-in-progress. The text of a current draft discusses the indistinguishability of reality and truth while pointing out the emergence/subsidence of notions about what is real and true under changing circumstances and contingencies.<br />Our penchant for mass/popular culture and following trends are examples. The word 'critical' has reached critical mass in our modern lexicon, seems to me. The resurgent political upheaval over critical race theory is an example of this---all in consideration of the origins of the phrase: activists for racial equality, Sojourner Truth; W.E.B. DuBois; and Frederick Douglass. Real people who defend what they deem a racial status quo do not want to hear of critical race theory. I am not, uh, critical of your fine writing. These are only one person's observations.Paul D. Van Pelthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13508874039164282696noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-58488330012111700512022-04-20T05:03:47.403-04:002022-04-20T05:03:47.403-04:00It seems that your comment on realism has changed ...It seems that your comment on realism has changed from your early book, Understanding Peasant China, to your recent books, New Directions in the Philosophy of Social Science and New Contributions to the Philosophy of History. Could you describe your intellectual trajectory? Thank you.Yufan Sunnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4058766287077382431.post-8486233086304745442022-04-19T20:11:15.860-04:002022-04-19T20:11:15.860-04:00I think it’s a common sense take, but at different...I think it’s a common sense take, but at different time scales even atoms and molecules start to look like forests rather than trees. If you can account for some of the dynamics of capitalism independent of location or time, why not say it’s real. I realize that this may be a structural realist argument. To be is to be real pattern, but something is worrisome about the intellectual construct position because in a very real sense all of science is an oversimplification. jimhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08997764980090710561noreply@blogger.com