Thank you so much for your long mail about time last December. I did not
have enough time to response to it because of deadline of Japanese
translation of Suchman's "plan and situated actions". It's almost done and
we are waiting for her new chapters for the new version.
As I said previously, chapter 4 of this book will be relevant to the
discussion and fortunately, I have part of mac files of some chapters of
this book. I pick up some points from chapter 4 in the following.
Doing social facts vs social facts as an objective entity
In the following, the term "social facts" can be replaced by "macro or meso
social structure" , "culture", "history" and others.
Suchman, Plan and Situated Actions, Chapter 4.
------------------------------------------Suchman
Emile Durkheim's famous maxim that "the objective reality of social facts
is sociology's fundamental principle" (1938) has been the methodological
premise of social studies since early in this century...........Human
action, the argument goes, cannot be adequately explained without reference
to these "social facts," which are to be treated as antecedent, external,
and coercive vis-a-vis the individual actor.
...........
Blumer argues that the social world is constituted by the local production
of meaningful action , and that as such the social world has never been
taken seriously by social scientists. Instead, Blumer says, investigations
by social scientists have looked at meaningful action as the playing out of
various determining factors, all antecedent and external to the action
itself. Whether those factors are brought to the occasion in the form of
individual predispositions, or are present in the situation as preexisting
environmental conditions or received social norms, the action itself is
treated as epiphenomenal.
...............
He(Mead) reserved the traditional assumptuons underlying philosophical, and
sociological thought to the effect that human beings possess minds and
consciousness as original "givens," that they live in worlds of preexisting
and self-constituted objects, and that group life consists of the
association of such reacting human organisms. (ibid., p. 61)
........................
More recently, ethnomethodology has turned Durkheim's maxim on its head
with more profound theoretical and methodological consequences.
.....................
The notion that we act in response to an objectively given social world is
replaced by the assumption that our everyday social practices render the
world publicly available and mutually intelligible. It is those practices
that constitute ethnomethods.
.......................
The outstanding question for social science, therefore, is not whether
social facts are objectively grounded, but how that objective grounding is
accomplised. Objectivitvity is product of systematic practices, or members'
method for rendering our unique experience and relative circumstances
mutually intelligible.
............................
The interest of ethnomethodologists, in other words, is in how it is that
the mutual intelligibility and objectivity of the social world achieved.
...................
By the same token, the objective reality of social facts is not the
fundamental principle of social studies, but social studies' fundamental
phenomenon.
----------------------------------------Suchman
In this context, I can paraprase the following G. H. Mead's phrase, again.
'When one recalls his boyhood days he cannot get into them as he then
was, without their relationship to what he has become; and if he could,
that is, if he could reproduce the experience as it then took place,
he could not use it, for this would involve his not being in the present
within which that use must take place. A string of presents conceivably
existing as presents would not constitute a past.'(Mead, p.30)
Ueno's paraphrasing Mead is as follows;
'When one recalls his macro social structure or large scale
process, he cannot get into them as it then
was, without their relationship to what his present practice has become
; and if he could, that is, if he could reproduce the macro or large scale
as it then took place, he could not use it, for this would involve his not
being in the present practice within which that use must take place.
........................"
History is not like the given natural environment.
(of course the "given natural environment" is actually not given.)
In next mail, I will go to ontogenesis and history based on the above
discussion, shown in the following paraphrasing.
The outstanding question is not whether "ontogensis" and "individual mind"
are objectively grounded, but how that objective grounding is accomplised.
Objectivitvity is product of systematic practices, or members' method for
rendering our unique experience and relative circumstances mutually
intelligible.
In short, in some sense, ontogenesis and other genesis can be regarded as
being something like social facts in the above phrases of Suchman.
Naoki Ueno
NIER, Tokyo