Please respond to xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu
To: xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu
cc: paul.cobb who-is-at vanderbilt.edu, cgl3@psu.edu(bcc: David H
Kirshner/dkirsh/LSU)
Subject: Sociogen reflux?
At 1:44 PM -0500 7/15/99, dkirsh who-is-at lsu.edu wrote:
>assumptions.) What one buys by taking the social as primary is the
>opportunity to theorize the social/cultural independently of the individual.
>But that's just what the pragmatists feared (how American!). Taking the
>two as balanced means that the theorizing of either is problematized.
The dearth of my social science training has led to puzzlement over the
rules for theory selection that seem to be generally assumed by some
others on this list. Permit me to be embarrassed by asking three
interrelated questions to David's last statement:
1) How is the theorizing problematized?
2) What principle prevents a theory of social and individual combined?
3) Why must a theory take the individual or the social as primary, and
what are the theoretical consequences for either to be "primary"?
_____________________________________
Bill,
I'm not a social scientist either. In the current thread, my comments are
meant to unpack possibilities for the interpretation that Cobb and others
have of sociocultural theory as generative at the social level, but
deterministic at the individual level. To address your questions starting
with the third one:
3) I don't know why a theory must take the individual or the social as
primary, but it appears that the sociocultural tradition does take the
social as primary. That's a starting point for the discussion, not, as
I've read the conversation thus far, a point of contestation. My own
take on the consequences is given in my earlier statement
>What one buys by taking the social as primary is the
>opportunity to theorize the social/cultural independently of the individual.
After all, if one is primary in time and fact, then it can be analyzed
independently of the other. Now it's true (as Nate pointed out in another
reply---thanks, Nate), that theorizing the social/cultural independently of
the individual would contravene the requirements of a dialectical analysis.
But the opportunity to theorize the social prior to, and hence independently
of, the individual means that the dialectical analysis may house within
it (perhaps only subtly) some sense of the social realm as independent.
I'm not saying this is true of sociocultural theory, only that this is a
possible part of the objection to Vygotsky's genetic principle.
1) My reading of the symbolic interactionist (SI) literature (I recommend
especially the Herman & Reynolds book, below) is that eschewing
a fulcrum perspective (social or individual) with which to leverage
the analysis complicates theorizing. The central SI notion of emergence is
emblematic of this complexity, as the phenomena of interest can
not be reduced to separable components. Obviously Cobb's theory
of "emergence" is based on this principle of irreducibility. So, no,
2) Nothing prevents a theory of the social and individual combined.
Except, as we can see in these excerpts from Gordon's ISCRAT paper
(thanks, Gordon!), doing so in a way that is truly integrative, rather
then juxtapositional involves ongoing reinterpretation of Vygotsky's
own initiatives:
>Nevertheless, the objections that have been raised against some of the
>better-known formulations of this insight, such as found in "the general
>genetic law of cultural development" (Vygotsky, 1981, p. 163), also have
>force, for, in them, Vygotsky seems to draw what is now considered to be
>an unacceptably sharp distinction between internal and external and
>between social (intermental) and individual (intramental) functioning.
David
Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press.
Kuhn, M. H. (1964). Major trends in symbolic interaction theory in the past
twenty-five years. Sociological Quarterly, 5(winter), 61-84.
Meltzer, B. N. (1994). Mead*s social psychology. In N. J. Herman & L. T.
Reynolds (Eds.), Symbolic interaction: An introduction to social psychology
(pp. 38-54). Dix Hills, NY: General Hall.
Meltzer, B. N., Petras, J. W., & Reynolds, L. T. (1975). Symbolic
interactionism: Genesis, varieties and criticism. London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul.