tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post2648333446780392633..comments2023-07-04T03:53:40.171-07:00Comments on Matt Kundert's Friday Experiment: Waiting For More: Gross and RortyMatt Khttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-29402084302056086182008-04-28T21:49:00.000-07:002008-04-28T21:49:00.000-07:00it's a rare writer who can invoke a theory without...it's a rare writer who can invoke a theory without it being overpowering.<BR/><BR/>along those lines, you might also sometime check out one of collins' predecessors, erving goffman, who was pretty much a master of observation and of coining non-technical sounding technical terms to do the bulk of his theoretical work for him. i like 'relations in public' the best. (most anything he wrote would be further away from straight-up sociology of knowledge / intellectual-life sociology, though.)<BR/><BR/>i've hardly read most of 'the sociology of philosophies', it's so long, and the chapters on non-western philosophy mean little to me. but given that it cannibalizes a lot of existing histories of philosophy but presents them in a novel way (i love those diagrams!), it's also a useful historical reference. especially for asking and answering some questions, or re-imagining some things, that one would actually have to have lots of knowledge to do with some other book. ; )<BR/><BR/>collins' recent 'interaction ritual chains' is a lot more helpful on the ramifications of his model, and has some applications to smoking, sex, and other social phenomena. it was useful for me to see that the basic elements of his model in 'SoP' could be meaningfully connected to some sorts of phenomena i had already seen ritual interaction models (mostly from goffman) used for.<BR/><BR/><BR/>i have trouble imagining this sociological model functioning well without just as much biography being done of the others with whom rorty may have been in dialogue.j.https://www.blogger.com/profile/09002699528461726304noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-49385168808907866222008-04-28T16:29:00.000-07:002008-04-28T16:29:00.000-07:00I remember when Collins' book first came out. I w...I remember when Collins' book first came out. I was, and still am, interested in big, sweeping stories about the course of philosophy and, with his occasional off-hand comments and sometimes entire papers devoted to the actual functioning of the philosophical community, reading Rorty had given me a taste for how the behind the scenes integrates with the stage performances. I remember seeing the book at Barnes & Noble and being fascinated by how huge it was and what it seemed to offer inside its covers. But, for an amateur with limited time and resources, it never proved enticing enough to wade through.<BR/><BR/>I had never heard his name mentioned since, so it was a nice surprise to see his name back in my purview. What you say about it seems quite interesting, and I think on the face of it, his idea about face-to-face exchanges being an important meter for this amorphous thing we call "energy" has some good legs to it. I think that idea ties in quite nicely to the Peircean/Deweyan idea of doubt being the fundamental concept that drives inquiry--if you have a lot of doubt about something <I>and</I> that doubt is a concern, then your energy will go up in relieving that doubt.<BR/><BR/>Of what little I've come to learn of the sociology of intellectuals, I think my main doubt is that it will ever be very good at individual cases, because being good at that, it seems to me, will always be best done by good, old-fashioned biography. On the other hand, I'm guessing the sociologists would agree and say they are doing something else. Sociology charts social dynamics and the smaller the social unit being examined, the more I imagine the "social" trends into the "psychological," which is a slightly different kettle of fish. <BR/><BR/>I'm betting that sociology will always be good at <I>informing</I> biography, but not at replacing it. Explaining why <I>a person</I>, as opposed to <I>people</I> did something is gotta' be biographical because the "Why?" is always fundamentally a self-understanding issue, which sociological and psychological study will always be able to inform, but never replace. I doubt Gross would claim to want to replace humanistic biography, but his case study seems to me to be a lukewarm biography with some awkwardly attached sociological disciplinary work. <BR/><BR/>Maybe Gross got caught by impatience, but it seems to me that the same thing could've been accomplished in a long paper which referred to primary materials and, for broader interpretation of those materials, other biographical work. Because his broader interpretations stink when they became attached to his sociological theory-work. When he focused on explaining Rorty, he did an alright job, but whenever he tried explaining Rorty with the gigantic machinery of sociology, things fell apart. Biographical work is like husking an ear of corn by hand that you've picked out of a garden. While sociology's threshers are good at the large fields of corn they normally deal with, they just look silly with that little piece of corn.<BR/><BR/>As a side note, as I understand Gross, the "self-concept" concept was something he was introducing to compliment the work of Bourdieu and Collins, not something from Bourdieu.Matt Khttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05304261355315746372noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24152639.post-17234398939706350882008-04-27T23:22:00.000-07:002008-04-27T23:22:00.000-07:00matt, i'd recommend that you check out collins' 't...matt, i'd recommend that you check out collins' 'the sociology of philosophies', particularly the opening section. i didn't catch much collins in what you report of gross. his model centers not on the role of material factors (though those are in there, for example in his arguments about the importance of the foundation of institutions for the long-term life of intellectual positions), but on the ritual interaction of face-to-face critical exchanges. success or failure to sustain one's ideas in such an interaction leads to a greater or lesser uh 'energy', which then more or less inclines a participant to devote resources to preparing for the next face-to-face meeting. collins thinks that some properties of the energy-economy of this kind of interaction, together with some properties of social networks, mean, among other things, that the number of leading, viable philosophical positions taken at any one time (in a locale?) will be capped at around 6; and he has ways of modeling historical change in positions as dependent on changes in the networks, say for example that when a school goes under, or its leading participants die, its positions tend to be absorbed (often changing them in the process) by other people in the network. (there are also some observations having to do with those members of networks who do the social management work of connecting people and keeping them in touch.)<BR/><BR/>i'd guess that the 'self-concept' stuff comes more from bordieu, maybe from 'homo academicus' or 'pascalian meditations', among other places? so perhaps a point of interest in combining the two is supposed to be that a change like rorty's is apparently hard to explain using a model like collins', but 'self-concept' gives some terms for success or failure (of an intellectual endeavor) at odds with the more basic defend-a-position, attack-positions terms which make a collinsian intellectual successful. (?)<BR/><BR/>(and again, 'successful' there should be understood as relatively autonomous to the practice: successful at philosophizing, say, not at securing chairs and heading the apa, though of course those things can also be explained sociologically as attendant on success by the primary criteria of 'philosophical success'.)j.https://www.blogger.com/profile/09002699528461726304noreply@blogger.com