Once upon a time there was an epistemology called positivism. This was made up by some French men with beards, who got a bit worried that no one would take them seriously because they were not scientists. They decided that you had to study everything by rigorous scientific methods so that people would believe that sociology was a science. Unfortunately they became very tied up in this and they refused to believe that anything that they could not measure and see with their own eyes existed. They thought that if you could see something and every time you saw something you also saw something else then the first thing made the second thing happen.
Because everyone in Europe hates each other some German men decided that they would have to do something different. They said ‘you French people are silly and can’t be trusted. Therefore you might see something and interpret it all wrong.’ They said that there was no real world at all and you had to try and work out how people interpreted things. They called this Hermeneutics because they wanted to make it sound like the German name Herman, but got it wrong. This is because it was all a bit complex because you have to interpret your own interpretation, so sometimes disappeared up its own arse in a hermeneutic cycle.
After that no one believed the French people any more.
A bit later some more people came to the conclusion that this was all a bit daft. They said that it was common sense that there was a real world, and that although you could not see some of the things that people were arguing about the existence of, you could see that they existed because you could see the effects they had, and although you could not describe them perfectly this did not mean that they did not exist. After all no one can see a some of the particles that are also a wave that physicists talk about, but without them we wouldn’t be able to watch The Matrix on TV and embark on all the philosophical arguments about reality that people start when they watch it.
Unfortunately by this point there were also people like Post Modernists who are people who take too many drugs and think they are really clever. Everyone secretly wants to be one, because they don’t have to come up with any real theories about anything. However this means that the sensible people who do believe that the world is real have to come up with really complex theories to argue how something that you cannot see, but blatantly exists, is there.
So long as you understand that there are some intransitive things and some intransitive things it doesn’t matter that you cannot see the intransitive things because the transitive things that we describe them with are good enough. You also have to see the world on three levels, on one level there are things that are just there, but sometimes these are activated and make things happen. Then sometimes you see these things happening and can measure them like the French people did. Because you can split reality up into these three levels and have bits of it that are transitive rather than intransitive this apparently means that you can justify your assumption that things are real. It is not really clear how this is so when you made that assumption to create the theory that proves your assumption, but apparently Roy Bhaskar understands it.
The problem with this is that when you actually have to try and explain how things are just there in the first place you get very confused and have a major ontological crisis, which is painful.
In sociology this does not matter because there is a simple answer. Society must exist because if it didn’t then we wouldn’t be able to do anything less banal than picking our noses like Outhwaite does. Because things like war happen this means that the invisible social structure that makes war happen must exist too.
The End.
(I think my Masters Degree is having a bad effect on me)
Treatise on Epistimologies
Once upon a time there was an epistemology called positivism. This was made up by some French men with beards, who got a bit worried that no one would take them seriously because they were not scientists. They decided that you had to study everything by rigorous scientific methods so that people would believe that sociology was a science. Unfortunately they became very tied up in this and they refused to believe that anything that they could not measure and see with their own eyes existed. They thought that if you could see something and every time you saw something you also saw something else then the first thing made the second thing happen.
Because everyone in Europe hates each other some German men decided that they would have to do something different. They said ‘you French people are silly and can’t be trusted. Therefore you might see something and interpret it all wrong.’ They said that there was no real world at all and you had to try and work out how people interpreted things. They called this Hermeneutics because they wanted to make it sound like the German name Herman, but got it wrong. This is because it was all a bit complex because you have to interpret your own interpretation, so sometimes disappeared up its own arse in a hermeneutic cycle.
After that no one believed the French people any more.
A bit later some more people came to the conclusion that this was all a bit daft. They said that it was common sense that there was a real world, and that although you could not see some of the things that people were arguing about the existence of, you could see that they existed because you could see the effects they had, and although you could not describe them perfectly this did not mean that they did not exist. After all no one can see a some of the particles that are also a wave that physicists talk about, but without them we wouldn’t be able to watch The Matrix on TV and embark on all the philosophical arguments about reality that people start when they watch it.
Unfortunately by this point there were also people like Post Modernists who are people who take too many drugs and think they are really clever. Everyone secretly wants to be one, because they don’t have to come up with any real theories about anything. However this means that the sensible people who do believe that the world is real have to come up with really complex theories to argue how something that you cannot see, but blatantly exists, is there.
So long as you understand that there are some intransitive things and some intransitive things it doesn’t matter that you cannot see the intransitive things because the transitive things that we describe them with are good enough. You also have to see the world on three levels, on one level there are things that are just there, but sometimes these are activated and make things happen. Then sometimes you see these things happening and can measure them like the French people did. Because you can split reality up into these three levels and have bits of it that are transitive rather than intransitive this apparently means that you can justify your assumption that things are real. It is not really clear how this is so when you made that assumption to create the theory that proves your assumption, but apparently Roy Bhaskar understands it.
The problem with this is that when you actually have to try and explain how things are just there in the first place you get very confused and have a major ontological crisis, which is painful.
In sociology this does not matter because there is a simple answer. Society must exist because if it didn’t then we wouldn’t be able to do anything less banal than picking our noses like Outhwaite does. Because things like war happen this means that the invisible social structure that makes war happen must exist too.
The End.
(I think my Masters Degree is having a bad effect on me)