On Jun 8, 2006, at 7:56 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote: > > > The sentence "human agents are telic, they organize around > imagined future states" sounds interesting, can you > explain it a bit?
There's a lot to talk about here. For now, it's one of many problems that fall out of the emergence of language/consciousness/culture, creating issues for use of biological evolution as a model for social theory. There's still a biological story to tell, but now it interacts with a newer system that moves at a much faster pace, a system where "variation" and "selection" follow rules that the agents themselves create and change several times within a biological reproductive cycle. I'm just reading Axelrod and Cohen's Harnessing Complexity, a book that means to introduce a broader audience who are thinking about organizations to complexity science. They organize the book in sections on variation, interaction and selection and do a nice job of introducing some of the differences that have to be included in a social and cultural millieu. Long pedigree on this issue with the Naturwissenschaft/Geisteswissenschaft debates, to use an old English expression I learned in grad school (:. > I also like the lens metaphor (a social > theory as a conceptual system through which people see how > their world works in a different way). If we use this > metaphor, the original question was if there is a > lens to see the whole system. Yes, that's the utopian dream, born of a desire to find better social theory that helps more comprehensively in applied work. (I like Kurt Lewin's quote, there's nothing as practical as a good theory). In the social realm, in my experience, narrow application of a single theory usually fails, and once you get the picture of a specific situation and how it works, the best you can do is patch together several different theories in a kind of ad hoc eclectic way. In a way that's the nomothetic/idiographic problem. Maybe it's possible to get past the distinction and create idiographic theory. The "narrative/lens" metaphor is an experiment in that direction. It has a pedigree--Erve Goffman's "dramaturgical" perspective is a famous US example. Though I only learned it a bit in conversation with a colleague, I think Oevermann's "Objektive Hermeneutik" is another example in Germany, because my colleague explained that "objective" was used in the sense of a lens. I need to learn more about it. > > Probably you are right, the most promising route seems > to be to identify common processes of interaction. > Yet perhaps the basic common processes of social interaction > are already known and carry well-known names: > Power, Freedom, Authority and Domination (Weber's "Herrschaft"), > Discipline, Peace, Solidarity, Commitment, Progress, Conflict, > Resolution, Resistance, Rights, Obligations, Conformity, > Innovation, Association (Weber's "Verband") Weber's sociology is a major resource, along with Schutz's synthesis of Weber and Husserl for some key foundations. > > The interesting thing about all these abstract concepts is > that they become concrete, observable and measurable phenomena > in Multi-Agent Systems. My interest as well. The models can certainly serve as a thought experiment lab, as Axelrod called them in an earlier book, to test a stripped down argument about some aspect of the social world. More interesting to me is whether there's a "minimal template" for a model to test any argument about how the social world works, like the question of initial network structure and distribution of risk that I mentioned from the drug models. > Max Weber for example defined power, > authority, discipline, etc. in concrete terms of social > interactions among persons (i.e. individual agents), > for instance in the case of "Macht" (power) > "Macht bedeutet jede Chance, innerhalb einer sozialen > Beziehung den eigenen Willen auch gegen Widerstreben > durchzusetzen" (power is the chance of an "agent" to > realize the own will in a social action even against the > resistance of others "agents"). Macht is what we need to do a job like this (: Viele Gruesse Mike > > -J. > > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
