Re: [xmca] Kevin's paper for discussion: causality

From: bb (xmca-whoever@comcast.net)
Date: Mon Jul 03 2006 - 17:12:09 PDT


I've been re-reading Granott's paper on units of analysis in mca from a while back, and it would seem that one needs to think of what unit to use before proceeding. Jay Lemke writes about downward [qualitative] causation at what I think is a societal scale, as well as do Durkheim and Weber. Arguably for Leont'ev, Activity is the unit of causation. But so to reflect this back to Kevin's paper, how do we think of C&E at a community [CoP] level, and is this a large enough unit to begin to determine causation, or do we need more? Does the community have a history, in which what has happened before is an essential ingredient in what is happening now? How far back should one go in an historical analysis? Does the community border on others in any way so that interaction with others is significant, i.e. there are exchanges of practices? Perhaps Hutchin's micronesian navigators were/still_are an isolated community, so that causation is entirely internal to it?

What especially does causation have to do with symmetry?
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