Re: [xmca] Did the Butterfly Leave the Cocoon, and then what?

..but it's hard to drag myself away.

On 2/23/08 2:17 PM, "Mike Cole" <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:

> Isn't Pavlov working with
> GROUPS as a warrant for claims about universal processes
> (in dogs, ........ ). What is idiographic about this work?? (I learned
> about this stuff from Luria, hence my harking back to his work with
> individuals and ideas about how to combine idographic and nomothetic).

On my reading, Pavlov studied groups of dogs, but on the face of it this
would provde a basis only for genealizations ABOUT dogs. He was able to make
general claims about animals, and all reflexes, because he had selected dogs
as representations of animals, and salivation as a representative reflex.
The study of a case can tell us something general. He was able to perceive
the general in the particular. He engaged in abstraction.

Perhaps ideographic and nomothetic are not the best terms, since they've
been coopted by the logic of experimental design. But the notion that
research can study the particular in order to learn about the general is an
important one. How? I'd start again with Marx: one studies a particular
commodity to learn about the 'commodity form' - the particular way of being
an entity that exists in our social nexus.

Here's a concern thats growing for me: where does V show in the Crisis a
recognition (as in Marx and Hegel) that particular social formations define
what counts as objective/objectivity/object? Today at least I cant find it

Martin

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Received on Sun Feb 24 11:10 PST 2008