Re: Comte and confounding isms

From: Keith Sawyer (ksawyer@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Mon Apr 22 2002 - 16:05:02 PDT


Howard wrote:

I come very close to reductionism in my thinking many times usually in reducing complexity to simplicity like in reducing human action to object oriented mediation.  Would this be reduction to you - and - is a level of complexity necessary for emergence or for such a version of social cultural theory?

I think that many non-reductionists would say that they are all for "reducing" complexity to simplicity; but unlike the reductionist, they would say that the description at the higher (emergent) level is a simpler description than the reductionist one.  So I think that's a different meaning of "reduction."  Is that what you meant?  But I think that emergent, irreducible properties only exist in complex dynamical systems, perhaps that was part of your meaning too.

Regarding Tolman and phenomenalism:
Tolman's use of some terms is not the same as the canonical philosophical meanings, which were how I used the terms in my article.  In my article, I was using the following definitions:

"Materialism": an ontological stance that the only substance that exists in the universe is matter.  Through the late 19th and early 20th century, materialism (in biology anyway) was opposed to vitalism, the position that living things had some extra, non-material substance (it could be "the soul" for example but most vitalists at the turn of the century at least tried to sound "scientific").

What Tolman calls phenomenalism I have mostly heard called empiricism, and (as Tolman notes) Hume is usually considered the first major empiricist.  Empiricism is usually opposed to realism, the belief that there is an underlying reality independent of sense experience.  In this sense, both empiricism and realism are compatible with materialism.  So that's where Tolman and I end up making contradictory statements.

Many behaviorists were empiricists and thus amenable to logical positivism (also known as "logical empiricism").  I agree with Howard that this makes behaviorism weak on theory, because the always-necessary theory remains implicit. 

Comte's positivism is not the same thing as logical positivism/empiricism.  For a good treatment of Comte on positivism, see Jonathan Turner's chapter "Comte would turn over in his grave" in his book Classical Sociological Theory.

R. Keith Sawyer

http://www.keithsawyer.com/
Assistant Professor
Department of Education
Washington University
Campus Box 1183
St. Louis, MO  63130
314-935-8724



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