My notes on anti-internalism and the irreality of mathematical systems were
minor points aside. What really takes my interest among the recent threads
are two to twist around each other: history in CHAT and CHAT as "a general
science".
My version of the notion of "a general science" is rather like Mike's, I
think. I usually say "there is only one social science", meaning that it's
basically pointless to separate economics from political science from
sociology from the study of culture from the study of language, discourse,
and semiosis. (Forgive me if I left out psychology, but I believe that if
you've got all the others in mutual interrelationship, you won't need a
separate psychology, except perhaps for clinical specializations.) It's all
one system and you can't understand any one of these "pieces" without the
others. Efforts to do so seem to produce little but rationalizations of
dominant ideologies and apologias for the social-political status quo. I
first noticed this at about the age of 19 or 20 and too many years of
reading in these fields (unevenly) has only made the conviction stronger.
Actually it's a bit worse than this, as I've argued around here for a long
time, and Bruno Latour and Michel Serres and others argue on various other
grounds: you can't understand people-in-society/culture without also
understanding material artifacts, and natural stuff that functions for
people in meaningful and technically mediating ways. And if you follow this
logic, you get to something like a actant-network, or a materially-mediated
meaning-mediated activity system, or an ecosocial-semiotic system. Which
puts the whole ecology into what has to be looked at as a unitary object of
study. Add to this the multiple levels or scales of organization that
characterize the various emergent phenomena, and you really do get
something of a "general" science, from the quantum scale (or lower) to at
least the global or solar-system scale (so far). In extensional terms. In
terms of timescales, that's from molecular interactions up through the ages
of Gaia.
But it's hard to even _think_ such a system and its temporal trajectory as
a whole. So how do we study its phenomena in manageable bits, other than by
dividing it to death the way the traditional disciplines do?
My current optimism on this (more deeply I suspect reality does not have as
much coherence as our project to understand it would require in order to be
successful, leading me toward less academic stances altogether) is again
much like Mike's approach to microgenetic, mesogenetic,
developmental-biographical, historical, and evolutionary timescales. I
would just say that we need a LOT of timescales in between (about one every
two or three orders of magnitude), and that we always have to take into
account in studying phenomena characteristic of a particular scale, the
scales immediately above and below. In addition we then have to assess the
extent to which others scales much further below, or above, get anomalously
translated in ways that have an impact at the level we are interested in.
Sometimes we get lucky and we can either deal with just three levels at a
time, or we can make some simplifying assumptions about the coupling from
more distant levels.
Everyone who uses AT-like models will recognize the basic multi-level
strategy of analysis; anyone who accepts the meaning-mediated character of
activity and is at least some sort of materialist will see that Culture
always plays a role and always has some material form. And that leaves the
role of History ... which is the issue, for me, of the larger timescale
processes, in both their contingency and their regularity or continuity.
How much history is relevant in a given analysis? how long, how far back?
and how do processes on the scales of months, years, decades, centuries, or
more impact _differently_ on the now-scale of the phenomena in focus?
What happens to our notions of what History is, and how we study it, when
we ask it to play a functional role in CHAT or in a general multi-scale
model of mediated activity in an ecosocial system? If we integrate History
into "a general science", then History, as a discipline, and as a notion,
has to change, no? In what ways?
What does it mean to study history on multiple timescales and ask how
processes on different timescales relate to each other?
What does it mean to study history as the record on long-term material
dynamical processes in eco-social systems, rather than simply as a record
of short-term events one after the other?
How does the contingency of history fit with the long-term dynamics of
historically-scaled processes? (This is probably a question analogous to
the famous one in evolutionary theory about how darwinian selection fits
with material dynamics at the scales of molecular, cellular, organismic,
and ecological processes ... and maybe the developmental processes of Gaia.
In fact, in The One Science, it might turn out to be exactly the same
question, but asked with a different scale and phenomenon in focus.)
What do we want the "H" in CHAT to do for our whole praxis? It does not
seem enough to just take it on faith that if you look at the history of
some activity system you will discover some wonderful relevance of some
kind. We ought to be able to say what kinds of relevance to expect from
what kinds (focus, timescale) of history. Event histories, personal
histories, institutional histories, cultural histories ....
What are some examples in the CHAT literature of studies that have very
productively incorporated historical data and analysis on the
lifespan-biographical scales or institutional history scales or cultural
history scales? decades to centuries .....
I take these issues to be a new and more productive version of the
micro-macro question, re-imagined as the issue of how to productively
relate what happens over minutes or days with what happens over decades and
centuries. (I don't exclude the similar issues of relating the activity
scale to the neurological scale or the evolutionary scale, I'm just a lot
more skeptical of our ability to yet do this.)
Finally, let me note that I am not looking for The One Science "to rule
them all and in the darkness bind them" (Tolkien's Ring). There should
still be pluralism, but a pluralism of Wholes, rather than the present
piece-meal Babel. No one science can imagine all the ways the world is with
us, but equally no science should define its object in such a way that it
cannot be pursued across all possible borders.
JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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