Re: [peirce-l] Slow Read : "Sciences as Communicational CoSally, list,
I can't resist trying to catch up somewhat, even if I'm slower than ketchup. I think that Joe would have taken your criticisms in your post below quite seriously. You might even have changed his mind, or at least gotten him to define "sociology" as he used it in his paper. Economics and science. Any study of people and society should be able to take logical determination into account - determination (causation in the broadest sense) by signs and evidences and interpretants as cognitive or semiosic factors. Economics continually considers the impacts of expectations and beliefs on decision-making about means. Science (along with mathematics) involves the active arranging for oneself (and the community of inquirers) to be determined by the object through signs to true interpretant propositions. Science is a deliberately redoubled form of logical determination, seeking bases for nontivial interpretant conclusions that are bases for further nontrivial interpretant conclusions and, to put it another way, seeking to know or learn in or on what lights or grounds one knows or learns things. As it happens, economics is a 'social science' that Peirce saw as suited to study and aid scientific research itself. Peirce wrote in Draft E - MS L75.180-181 in Memoir 28 his 1902 Application to the Carnegie Institute: [...] I examine the question of the kinds of knowledge of which the diffusion is most desirable, always in the interest of the advancement of science. I find the normative sciences, including economics, of greatest importance. If our people could only learn enough political economy to see that it is a difficult science in which it is needful to trust experts, there would be far more money to spend on science than the genius of the country could use to the best advantage. The analytical part of political economy is directly dependent on logical methodeutic. It is a question whether it is not a branch of logic. (The passage raises a host of classificational questions. Did Peirce think that some of economics is part of ethics? And if the analytical part of economics directly depends on logical methodeutic, but is not part of logic, then by Peirce's Comtean classificational rule, it must come at some point _after_ logic, which means that, though normative, it is either in metaphysics or in the special sciences - presumably it would be there as an application of philosophical normative science.) Psychology (and sociology) and science. Peirce also insisted in the Carnegie Application (in Memoir 15, in Draft D - MS L75.247-248) that logic (including methodeutic) as part of cenosocopic philosophy is independent of psychology as a special science. However, that is not to say that all study of science is in logic or in methodeutic in particular. There seems no reason in principle that a special science, aided by applications from broader or more abstract sciences, _cannot_ successfully study actual disciplines of science, mathematics, etc., as actually practiced. (I do see an inherent _difficulty_, though not an impossibility, in studying minds that may be more brilliant than one's own mind, minds studying subject matters that may be "above one's paygrade," etc.) Now, let's say that often enough sociological factors in mathematical work pale to the point that _usual_ sociological factors and explanations offer diminishing returns for sociology about mathematics. The result seems much like what Joe says - one is not so much doing sociology (as usually understood) any more. The question is: so what? I grant the practical and theoretical difficulties, but not the theoretical impossibility. One's work becomes more interdisciplinary and might not entirely belong in the sciences of discovery at all - it could, in Peirce's (and I assume Joe's) view get into "Science of Review" which does depend on special sciences, cenoscopy, and mathematics, and endeavors to form a philosophy of them all. So Joe's criticisisms of sociology of science might apply better to actual sociology, at least as he knew it, as actually or potentially abused for political ends, than to sociology at its ideal best. Unity of subject matter. I'm also not sure that I agree with Joe about an importance of the unity of subject matter to a point where it seems (though Joe assuredly did not say this) that unities of means and of purpose don't invite or require being taken into account from the beginning. _Ulysses_ and sociology about Dublin are both about Dublin but have different purposes. Even among the sciences, Peirce for his part distinguishes by purposes and method as well as by subject matter. But that's a whole other discussion. Implicit norms. In regard to your identifying Joe's discussion of implicit norms as belonging to a theme in cultural anthropology, it's also hard to resist mentioning Feynman's view that scientific norms are passed along implicitly, tacitly, and should be more explicitly understood. Thanks again for your thoughtful and illuminating discussion. Best, Ben ----- Original Message ----- From: Sally Ness To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, September 08, 2011 4:50 AM Subject: Re: [peirce-l] Slow Read : "Sciences as Communicational Communities" Segment 3 Segment 3 Dear List, I move on now to the next segment of the paper, "Sciences as Communicational Communities," as I am dividing it. This segment begins with paragraph 11 and ends with paragraph 17. It is reproduced in its entirety at the end of the post. There are a number of subjects addressed in these paragraphs, making this the most complex segment of the paper, in my view. Several key ideas from Peirce make their appearance, as JR lays out how he sees scientific communities organizing themselves in contrast to the negotiational view of the academic politicians. In paragraph 11 JR makes a crucial point. He asserts that, what governs scientific communication (and, so, truth-seeking) are norms that are well understood in practice but not in critical reflection (either scientists' or non-scientists'). I wonder if this practice/reflection distinction is possibly related to the the logica utens/logica docens distinction somehow. In any case, the reason for this absence of critical reflection in JR's view is that the norms are so familiar that their significance is rarely a focus of attention. As a consequence, the understanding of why they are recognized as they are and how they "carry the burden" of regulating truth-seeking/objectivity remains vague. Here, JR identifies the norms in a manner that, as it happens, fits exactly with the cultural anthropological definition of "culture." Cultural phenomena generally speaking are defined by anthropologists as phenomena that are passed on from generation to generation, learned by youngers from elders generally without critical reflection, and are typically governed by intelligence that is so familiar as to "go without saying." A whole discipline of social science, in other words, has grown up around the problem of investigating exactly the kind of thing JR is here intending to investigate. In this regard, JR is himself taking up the mantle of the cultural anthropologist (at least from the perspective of members of that discipline), apparently unintentionally, and engaging in a kind of inquiry that has defined this particular social science for over a century. In paragraph 12, JR elaborates further on the character of the norms he seeks to better understand, making two further assertions: 1) these norms govern professional publication and 2) these norms are justified by the positive ("flourishing") condition of the community using them. It would seem that with regard to 2) especially, the spirit of Peirce is again clearly manifest. The norms are not somehow essentially significant or inherently true or otherwise meaningful. Their validity is contingent on the general character of the collective that sets them to work. In paragraphs 13, 14, and 15, JR turns his attention to defining publication, drawing attention to certain features of it so as to be able to reflect critically on the norms themselves. He notes that the kind of publication he has in mind (a best case token of what he acknowledges is a more diverse general type) is one in which what is published provides feedback to the leading edges of a given field of inquiry. Most important: publication must be understood as occurring within a "public" that shares a common interest in a given subject-matter. When publication is understood with these traits in mind, a range of non-obvious implications can be unpacked that JR asserts will help reflect critically on the norms at issue. Paragraph 16 is a key passage in this paper. Here JR underscores the importance of the subject-matter orientation that drives professional communication/truth-seeking in his view. He writes, "academic publication is based on what is minimally essential in maintaining a common and increasingly adequate reference to the subject-matter of the field of inquiry." JR finds the hard sciences exemplary in this regard--the special relation of the hard sciences to pragmaticism is made explicit here. The hard sciences have identified what is minimally essential to maintain a common/adequate reference: "controlled observation." This general conception has provided a common and adequate basis for all professional communication. It has enabled the scientific community to reference its subject-matter with greater clarity, accuracy, and truth, and this has generated a flourishing community--evidence that the conception is one to be valued. The hardness of the hard sciences is a product of their controlled observation of subject-matter, and the stability that this methodological principle has tended to bring about in relation to how its subject-matter has been comprehended. JR actually uses the term "object" in this paragraph, leaving little doubt that he has the Object/Sign relation in mind in this description of how scientific inquiry is governed. The paragraph stresses the Dynamic Object's (DO's) capacity to determine the Representamen--something that has come up in numerous papers prior to this one. JR does not appear to be dealing with the Immediate Object (IO) in this discussion. It would seem that, if he were to do so, it might complicate the picture of scientific inquiry considerably, as the IO, as has been repeatedly observed in previous threads, is determined, not by the DO, but via the Representamen-Object relation. In the last paragraph of this section, 17, JR turns the model of scientific publication he has developed against the academic politician, or as he now labels the figure, "the sociologist of knowledge" (this, as I've said before, seems most closely to reference Foucault, although at this point I begin to wonder if the figure is really a caricature that JR is invoking entirely for the purposes of making his own position clearer and which has no actual or specific scholarly referent). He argues that the sociologist of knowledge is led to making the false claims about scientific practice that he does because the sociologist cannot relate to the subject-matter of science. The sociologists' understanding of the subject-matter's controlled observation is so entirely lacking that the sociologist cannot even begin to develop a relation to it. And if the sociologist somehow were to gain this understanding and develop a scientific perspective on the subject-matter, the very act of doing so would cause him to loose his sociological focus and prevent him from pursuing any sociological investigation. With regard to JR's first argument here, he is generally in line with the disciplinary perspective of cultural anthropology. That is, a cultural anthropologist investigating a scientific community (and there are a large number of anthropologists doing this these days, particularly with regard to communities that have formed in relation to the medical sciences) would consider it necessary to develop expertise on the subject-matter the community is investigating and to be able to communicate with the members of the community about that subject-matter fluently. Lacking this familiarity with the community's forms of controlled observation of the subject-matter, the anthropologist would have no credibility as a social scientist to make any claims of understanding that community's professional practices. So to this point, JR is actually expressing views that correspond closely to anthropological disciplinary norms of conduct. However, JR's second claim, that a sociologist cannot do both sociological research and also engage in the research practices of the scientific community studied departs from the anthropological disciplinary perspective and would meet with vigorous opposition. The discipline of cultural anthropology has developed a distinctive method, called long-term "participant/observation," designed to deal with exactly this situation. The method, which is identified specifically with cultural anthropological (not sociological) research, is processual in character. It recognizes that over the course of an extended period of interaction, the anthropologist will be shifting continuously between two fundamentally different modes of learning: one in which the anthropologist observes analytically the activities of the community and one in which the anthropologist engages actively in the practices of the community. JR's claim that such multi-modal learning is impossible has virtually the whole of the ethnographic record weighing in against it, including a large literature focused on the anthropology of science and technology, published by anthropologists whose knowledge of the scientific subject-matter and the methods used to investigate it is extensive, detailed, and acknowledged as accurate by the scientific communities at issue. At least if one goes by the empirical evidence, JRs denial of any possibility of this kind of shifting between disciplinary practices while engaged in a research process appears invalid. Having said this, I'm not sure that it matters all that much. JR's primary interest here is not really to explain why academic politicians/sociologists of knowledge are destined to come up with false images of science, but to identify how hard scientists can dispense with them once they do. However, since JRs comments are so directly touching upon concepts, methods and procedures of my home discipline, I supply this additional commentary. The limits of his cross-disciplinary understanding would seem to come into view in this segment. This attack on the sociologist of knowledge brings this segment to a close. JR will now leave the plight of the sociologist aside and move on to the heart of the matter--the analysis of the norms themselves as they can be seen to govern inquiry. I will post on Segment 4 in 3-4 days. Best, Sally Sciences as Communicational Communities, Paragraphs 11-17 I omit discussion here of the way in which something like negotiation does in fact play an important role in the sciences, which I would argue to be secondary and not truly negotiational except in a very loose sense. But to move to the heart of the matter as quickly as possible here, let me simply say that all communication among scientists that occurs in the process of inquiry as an essential part of the process is governed by norms that are usually understood well enough in practice -- in the hard sciences at least -- to be generally effective, but which are still too poorly understood in critical reflection, both within and outside of the sciences, to provide the sort of understanding which is needed if these attacks on the sciences are to countered as effectively as they should be. It is the recognition in practice of these norms that constitutes the commitment to truth and objectivity. But so familiar are they in everyday practice that their significance goes unnoticed and critical reflective discussion of them with the aim of understanding why they are so commonly recognized and how they carry the burden of the commitment to truth and objectivity rarely occurs. Sometimes the obvious, precisely because of its ubiquitous presence, goes unnoticed. [12] What are these norms and what justifies them as norms? They are the norms that govern professional publication in academia in general, and not simply in the sciences, and their justification--supposing they really are justifiable--consists in the fact -- supposing it is a fact -- that a research community that honors them in the spirit as well as the letter will flourish whereas a research community which conforms to them only in the letter without a real understanding of what their purpose or rationale actually is, or which does not conform to them at all, will waste its intellectual energies in endless acrimonious dispute about methodology and in the politics of academic empire building and turf protection. [13] I am not, of course, referring to publication schedules or publication policies established in mindless emulation of what are often bogus models of research and scholarship having no real connection with the way professional publication actually works at the leading edge of research, but rather of publication as the process of communication of and about results as these results are being fed back into the process that produced them in such a way as to modify that process itself by altering its content or form in some way. Results that do not have that immediate effect may, to be sure, have such an effect at a later time -- possibly even many years later -- and it is important to understand how to control the flow of research results in such a way that what is not assimilated or assimilable at the leading edge at a given time be retained in standing availability. Indeed, it would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of a sophisticated understanding of this for the health of a tradition of inquiry, notwithstanding the fact that it is something hardly understood at all at present and typically discussed only in connection with the economics and politics of publication rather than in connection with its underlying logic or rationale. But I cannot devote even the bare minimum of discussion of this that would be required to make its importance clear in the present paper and will simply bracket that for the present in order to focus attention effectively on publication, which will be assumed here to be fed back into the research process at the leading edge or at least made maximally available for that purpose. The question is, what do we have to understand about this to understand what the most fundamental norms of inquiry are? [14] I believe that these things can be understood and the norms can even be specified in some detail if it is understood that scientific publication proper, like professional academic publication in general, is (1) communication that occurs within a special public (2) which consists of all persons--living, dead, and as yet unborn--with a common interest in a certain subject-matter, (3) the common interest being to come to a better understanding of that subject-matter (more profound, more comprehensive, and better grounded) than exists at any given moment, and (4) who understand that what binds them together in a communicational community is not their personal affinities and likenesses but their common concern that that subject-matter should be increasingly well understood by all who are similarly concerned. [15] Now, if this sounds initially like a sequence of truisms, don't dismiss it on that account: for one thing, truisms frequently have the merit of being true (their deficiency is that they tend to be jejune and require rejuvenation); for another, anything we discover from critical reflection on our own practice should be of the nature of a truism since it is supposed to express what we already take for granted; for a third, there is abundant testimony from philosophers from antiquity to the present to the effect that the most difficult things to perceive are precisely those that are ubiquitous in our lives or in our experience; and for a fourth, from these truisms or something very like them we can unpack a range of implications about the norms not only of scientific activity but of academic intellectual life in general that are by no means obvious and can be of help for the problem at hand. [16] My intention in the formulation above is to lay as much stress as possible on the subject-matter of inquiry, and if the occasion permitted I would try to show, first, that the universal--and commonly recognized--form of professional academic publication is based on what is minimally essential in maintaining a common and increasingly adequate reference to the subject-matter of the field of inquiry, and I would argue that the reason the "hard" sciences have been so successful as to warrant that appellation lies in their adoption of the general conception of controlled observation (experiment is the special case) as the stabilizing element at the basis of all professional communication, which functions primarily to insure that it is finally the subject-matter or object of scientific study--not the scientists--that controls science by determining in interaction with the inquiring scientist what is and is not accepted and taken for granted in the science. [17] I can say in the present space at least this much, though, by way of suggestion, that the sociologist of knowledge who concludes that it must be negotiation among scientists that lies at the basis of science does so because the sociologist, as an outsider to the inquiry being observed, cannot relate to the subject-matter as the scientist-participants do and indeed cannot locate the subject-matter in its essential internal relationships within inquiry at all, and thus must leave out of account that factor in the process the reference to which constitutes the basis of its objectivity and makes pertinent the concept of truth. The sociologist can, of course, become a participant just as anybody else who qualifies themselves to do so can in principle become a participant, but insofar as the sociologist participates the sociologist is doing something other than sociology (except in the special case of inquiry into sociology as a science), and the sociological account remains radically incomplete and, apparently, incapable of completion -- unless, indeed, the sociologist can find the thread that leads out of this labyrinth (which has been recognized in a variety of forms before) by inquiring into the one case where the sociologist seems clearly to be in position to relate to the subject-matter of inquiry in the way required by inquiry into that inquiry, namely, in the case of sociological self-reflection. The methodological problem is, of course, to avoid disappearing into the mysteries of one's own navel in doing so. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the PEIRCE-L listserv. To remove yourself from this list, send a message to [email protected] with the line "SIGNOFF PEIRCE-L" in the body of the message. To post a message to the list, send it to [email protected]
