Submitted by Paul Grobstein on Thu, 12/20/2007 - 5:18pm.
From Sandy Schram, reacting to an email of the above, with his permission ...
This continues to be an interesting conversation. I have been away on sabbatical at the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and could not participate. I did however want to write to say that while I agree, I think, with almost all the interesting lines of argument you are pursuing for the most part, I do not want to emphasize the "less wrong" idea. That seems to imply some objective baseline for evaluating the stories we tell. Poststructural social theorists, like myself, prefer to use terms like adequation to show how science is more about use than truth. Adequation evaluates stories about the world in terms of how well they help us live. They are more or less true in the sense that they prove themselves to be more or less adequate or appropriate to how we are trying to live in the world. Their adequation is contingent upon how well they enable us to do things we are trying to do. If they enable us to test for how long a fossil was in the ground, or how an atom is put together, or even to have clean water, or to screen for diseases then they are better stories than if they do not. This does not mean they are in perfect correspondence with the objective facts of the world but it does mean that their version of those facts better fit not necessarily those facts but the facts of that theory and their relationship to us and our experiencing and living in the world. Science as use is often confused with science as truth. Science as use is not less wrong that science that has no instrumental value, it just is preferred because of its power associated with it enabling us to do things with the natural world. That is impressive itself but it is not the objective truth of things. Adequation would be my way of characterizing how we decide which scientific stories are to be preferred.
The social sciences find the issue of adequation to be more layered since the social world is experienced variously by different people at the same time, ensuring that there will always be multiple stories that can be shown to have merit in understanding how things are happening or have happened. Plus, humans can internalize the stories they are told about themselves making the subject matter even less stable. This is where looping comes in in the social sciences, as when clients let the therapy do the talking for them as if they really experience the world the way the theory says when in fact they have been experiencing it in entirely different idiom up til then. Much of the social world operates this way as a self-fulfilling prophecy. I have written about this in my last book Welfare Discipline.
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Narrative is determined not by a desire to narrate
but by a desire to exchange. (Roland Barthes, S/Z)
A poststructural social theorist on "adequation" and "loops"
From Sandy Schram, reacting to an email of the above, with his permission ...
This continues to be an interesting conversation. I have been away on sabbatical at the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and could not participate. I did however want to write to say that while I agree, I think, with almost all the interesting lines of argument you are pursuing for the most part, I do not want to emphasize the "less wrong" idea. That seems to imply some objective baseline for evaluating the stories we tell. Poststructural social theorists, like myself, prefer to use terms like adequation to show how science is more about use than truth. Adequation evaluates stories about the world in terms of how well they help us live. They are more or less true in the sense that they prove themselves to be more or less adequate or appropriate to how we are trying to live in the world. Their adequation is contingent upon how well they enable us to do things we are trying to do. If they enable us to test for how long a fossil was in the ground, or how an atom is put together, or even to have clean water, or to screen for diseases then they are better stories than if they do not. This does not mean they are in perfect correspondence with the objective facts of the world but it does mean that their version of those facts better fit not necessarily those facts but the facts of that theory and their relationship to us and our experiencing and living in the world. Science as use is often confused with science as truth. Science as use is not less wrong that science that has no instrumental value, it just is preferred because of its power associated with it enabling us to do things with the natural world. That is impressive itself but it is not the objective truth of things. Adequation would be my way of characterizing how we decide which scientific stories are to be preferred.
The social sciences find the issue of adequation to be more layered since the social world is experienced variously by different people at the same time, ensuring that there will always be multiple stories that can be shown to have merit in understanding how things are happening or have happened. Plus, humans can internalize the stories they are told about themselves making the subject matter even less stable. This is where looping comes in in the social sciences, as when clients let the therapy do the talking for them as if they really experience the world the way the theory says when in fact they have been experiencing it in entirely different idiom up til then. Much of the social world operates this way as a self-fulfilling prophecy. I have written about this in my last book Welfare Discipline.