Hi Paul, Well, there's a couple of levels to answer that. The typical
social science answer -- sometimes, within a particular framework, yes, I
see collective expansive mastery. For example, one of the communities I
participate in, and helped build, are people looking critically at computer
systems as part of human activity. In 1980, when I started doing that
work, there were scattered and often isolated scholars, no job tracks, no
journals of our own, and a difficult row to hoe with the technical side of
computing. So within that frame, there has been great progress, at least
from my point of view.
Metaphysically, I think historical processes can go in either direction,
and perhaps many directions at once, though. And one person's progress, as
you note, can be another's nemesis.
Another side: granularity matters. Where you draw the boundary of that
question, I mean. So, I think it is likely that much of the world as we
know it is headed for ecological disaster. On a 5 year time scale,
locally, that means I get more respiratory diseases, but my life hasn't yet
changed dramatically....on a hundred year time scale, it could mean
widescale tragedy and huge changes for everyone. At the same time, it
doesn't mean that I/we can't act with dignity and compassion within the
frame at hand, even if things look grim on the wider and longer scale. So
progress is not only relative, but nested.
Some Friday afternoon thoughts on the eve of Martin Luther King, Jr.
holiday weekend.
Thanks for your questions, Paul. L*
>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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