[Air-l] conceptual lexicon

[Jeremy Hunsinger]

>
>> here's a thought if you want to really deal with social
>> theory, throw
>> out 'methodological individualism' and figure out a way of actually
>> analyzing the collective.  once that is done, then the social
>> will be
>> analyzed in a way that is far more profound and perhaps more real.
>
> Again, I agree with these two sentences, but not the implication.  
> We should
> indeed focus on the "real", and move beyond invididualism. But that  
> doesn't
> mean that "analyzing the collective" requires aggregate measures.
> Descriptions and observations should proceed from case instances.  
> We can
> thus analyze a collective (whatever it's called - network, community,
> nation, Frank, etc.) as the multitude of observed interactions (is the
> network of talk dense or sparse, tight or loose?) without  
> extrapolating that
> the collective is something more or other than those observed  
> interactions.
> Analyzing a collective, devoid of descriptions of case instances,  
> is less
> profound (and much farther from "real") than individualism.

It is actually unclear that we can extrapolate a collective identity  
from a multitude of identities, though that is what many believe....   
It is just one theoretical tradition that accepts that aggregation or  
the whole is equal to the some of the parts, others believe that the  
whole is less than and/or greater than the some of the parts.   It is  
unclear to me whether it can be more profound than individualism,  
what does seem to be the case is that people have real problems with  
both Genetic and Atomistic Fallacies between the individual and the  
collective.


Jeremy Hunsinger
Center for Digital Discourse and Culture
() ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail
/\ - against microsoft attachments

http://www.aoir.org The Association of Internet Researchers
http://www.stswiki.org/ stswiki
http://cfp.learning-inquiry.info/  LI-the journal
http://transdisciplinarystudies.tmttlt.com/  Transdisciplinary  
Studies:the book series