Leigh,
Thanks for posting the sections from the book on aristotelian and
prototypical categories and also for your continued discussion of the work
you have been doing. Your examples of how political action changed
administrative/diagnostic categories were cases in which it seems that
"progress" was made in some sense, at least from our present day
perspective: homosexuality can no longer be used as an
administrative/diagnostic term that can lead to the imposition of
involuntary actions on an individual; the cholera incident resulted in
reform of inadequate statistical methods. The abolition of apartheid in
South Africa was a motive supported as a process of liberation and therefor
progress. I recognize that were I a white South African who enjoyed the
material benefits of apartheid I might not consider its abolition to be
progress.
Do you think that these historical processes have any direction?
Engestrom (1988) portrayed the movement of the contradictions in an activity
system between rationalized and humanized activity as moving toward
'collectively and expansively mastered'. Do you see anything like that in
the socio-political processes of categorical change you have studied?
Paul H. Dillon
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