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Some thoughts on Wade Hands' HES editorial.
It would be helpful (and facinating) to get a good historical
account of the roots of the SSK picture in 19th-century discussions
of the problem of defining history, science, and social theory.
My guess is that this history would show that SSK is part of a radical
picture of science and history with roots in German neo-Kantian
and neo-Hegelian thought, and French constructivism. This history
would support Ross Emmett's earlier reminder that different approaches
to history come imbedded with different substantive pictures of the
character of knowledge and social theory. In this respect much of SSK
work would inherently constitute a radical rival to other research
approached and other pictures of social phenomena and history. In other
words, imbedded within the SSK approach is an inherent begging of the
question about the explanatory strategy and logical status of social
theory.
Another problem of the SSK research effort, as least in some versions,
is a research agenda that posits and attempts to impose a particular
causal picture of social determination which has decided the matter in
advance of as well as independently of the empirical & conceptual problems
facing the scientist. A paradigm example of this has been the account
of the 'social determination' of the ideas of Charles Darwin -- which, as
reported by Michael Ghiselin and others, has not held up well to detailed
historical and theoretical examination of the particulars involved.
On the begging of the question which much of SSK and its intellectual
tradition represent in the context of economics, see:
L. Mises, _Human Action_ 1966.
F. Hayek, "The Facts of the Social Science", in _Individualism and
Ecomics Order", 1948.
--
The problematic character of the sociology of scientific
knowledge (SSK) approach is particularly radical when applied
to social theory, because it so radically provides a
psychologistic and relativistic rival to universalistic and
time- and place-independent pictures of the explanatory
strategy and logical status of economics. Much of SSK is
implicitly a rival account that substitues a motivational or
genetic 'unmasking' of an understanding of phenomena for an
account that appeals to the supperior plausibility of rival causal
pictures. On these issues I'd particularly recommend:
Karl Popper, _The Open Society and Its Enemies_, Princeton: Princeton
U. Press, 1945/1966.
For someof the issues involved I'd also recommend
P.M.S. Hacker, _Wittgenstein's Place in Twentieth-Century
Analytic Philosophy_, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
For an SSK history of the background of these problems in
German efforts to make sense of history, psychology, logic, and
social theory, as well as value theory and ethics, see:
Martin Kusch, _Psychologism_, London: Routledge, 1996.
Greg Ransom
Dept. of Philosophy
UC-Riverside
http://members.aol.com/gregransom/hayekpage.htm
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