Dear Prof Mark Foster: Dear kind and patient scholar
I read your post below carefully and I so appreciate your answers. > > I am primarily using these terms in their **sociological**, not theological, senses. > > 1. Social nominalism is the view that groups and societies are merely names that we use for collections of individuals. From a nominalist standpoint, individuals are real. Groups and societies are not real. By extension, the Word of God might be regarded as a convenient fiction to nominate texts written in different times and places by specific persons. > > I agree with social nominalism to a point, but it depends on how one defines "reality." Whereas individuals have an ontological reality, groups and societies have a socially constructed, not an ontological, reality. However, since, like most sociologists, I regard the group, not the individual, as the basic unit of theory and research, I would not call myself a social nominalist. In fact, there are only a few social nominalists in sociology, and most of them (Burgess, Bushell, Homans, etc.) can be found in what is called the "social behaviourist" school (based on behavioural psychology). > > 2. Social constructionism is a complex perspective which reduces, or deconstructs, reality into acts of subjective social construction. The radical perspective in gender studies, which includes psychological androgyny (the position that children of both sexes should be socialised identically), is basically constructionist. Gender is regarded as a subjective human creation. The texts of the Bible were social constructions and can be reconstructed by each new generation and society. > > I see some merit in social constructionism and use the perspective a bit. However, I reject its extreme ontological relativism. Although some sociologists *claim* to be social constructionists, the subjectivist (even solipsistic) assumptions of constructionism, a bit like Dilthey's hermeneutic circle, make it untenable, in my view, for a sociologist to be a complete constructionist. > > 3. Postmodernism is a somewhat vague term which can refer to any number of different subjectivist perspectives, including constructionism and deconstructionism. Postmodernists tend to be suspicious of the scientific method. However, if each scientist, including each social scientist, is bound to see empirical phenomena differently from her or his colleagues, what is the point of science? The so-called "Enlightenment project" is largely abandoned. > > I find a moderate social deconstruction to be useful in deconstructing various social and cultural traits. However, I do not find the generalising assumptions of postmodernism to be particularly useful in sociology. > > 4. Critical realism in sociology refers to the work of philosopher, Roy Bhaskar. It is a highly complex framework and much to complex to do justice to in a paragraph summary. That said, critical realism thoroughly rejects the essentialism of the Platonists and neo-Platonists. All essences are individual, not universal. What is universal, or creates an identity of type, is the **real**. To Bhaskar, at least prior to 1998, that universal (or reality), social structure, is not a constant, but is a dialectical product of history (hence the "critical" element). Society and its groups are constantly being restructured as people react to their own histories. > > Critical realism comes closest to the approach I use (restructurational realism) in sociology. BUT PLEASE further read these excerpts and tell me what is the point of view of these author? Including the Century of Light authors? There seems to be a conflict...Can you understand any of it? If any one can it must be you Mark. Please take a few minutes and explain the background to me. I will not trouble you again. I promise khazeh [ignorant but seeking light] I once read this somewhere too but this too I do not understand! Question: What do you get when you cross Derrida with a member of the Mafia? Answer: Someone making you an offer you can't understand, or refuse! Buck writes: Baha'u'llah's references to Christ and the New Testament served to relativize the Islamic heritage. *For a new religion to emerge from Islam, with its dense, millennium-old traditions and highly elaborated religious scholarship,* Cole observes, *was as difficult as for a moon to escape the gravity of its planet* (66). Invoking the French linguist Saussure's metaphor of the chessboard, Cole suggests that Baha'u'llah's adducing of Christian scriptures reconfigured the revelatory position of the Qur'an as dispensational rather than final, causing it to look quite different from the traditional Muslim perspective of it. There is also the element of a potential Christian audience, although this cannot have been the primary motive, considering that Baha'u'llah had adduced the New Testament in some of his early Baghdad works, evidently for interpretive rather than for missiological reasons (66-7). http://bahai-library.org/reviews/jesus.html Cole writes: I was urged by Franklin Lewis of the University of Chicago to make clearer in this revision (1 April 1994) the distinction between a perhaps more Apollonian semiotic approach that would stress polyvalence, and the more Dionysian approach of Derrida's deconstruction, which would talk of semantic ambiguity and instability. I do not myself believe deconstruction is altogether incompatible with elements of Babi-Baha'i epistemology, but in this paper I am simply opening the question. I do wish to suggest that in any case the alternative Western traditions of positivism and the Vienna circle approach to language analysis are unlikely to be as helpful in understanding Baha'u'llah's and the Bab's approaches to textual interpretation as are either semiotics or postmodernism (the latter itself diverse and not limited to deconstruction). http://bahai-library.org/provisionals/surah.sun.html Jonah Winters writes: One must tread with care to keep historiographical deconstruction from degenerating into mere historical solipsism. Nonetheless, an awareness of the degree to which interpretation colours our understanding of history offers insights which can give sanction to a great deal of "remembered" and, to a small extent, even to "invented" history. and the text that we are all encouraged to read the Century of Light on your website says: ***The sense of disillusionment which, as Shoghi Effendi warned, the spread of political corruption would create in the minds of the mass of humankind is now widespread. Outbreaks of lawlessness have become pandemic in both urban and rural life in many lands. The failure of social controls, the effort to justify the most extreme forms of aberrant behaviour as primarily civil rights issues, and an almost universal celebration in the arts and media of degeneracy and violence-these and similar manifestations of a condition approaching moral anarchy suggest a future that paralyses the imagination. Against the background of this desolate landscape the intellectual vogue of the age, seeking to make a virtue out of grim necessity, has adopted for itself the appellation and mission of "deconstructionism".*** ---------- You are subscribed to Baha'i Studies as: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Baha'i Studies is available through the following: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://list.jccc.net/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=bahai-st news://list.jccc.net/bahai-st http://www.escribe.com/religion/bahaist (public) http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED] (public)
