Thus, when I place the ground of truth or morality outside ongoing experience, either I continue to hold to the probabilities it offers me (merely devalued by the ideal of absolute knowledge), or I disguise these probabilities as absolute certainties-and then I am letting go of the verifiable for the sake of truth, which is to say I drop the p to catch its shadow. I waver between uncertainty and presumptuousness without ever finding the precise point of human resolution. If, on the other hand, I have understood that truth and value can be for us nothing but the result of the verifications or evaluations which we make in contact with the world, before other people and in given situations of knowledge and action, that even these notions lose al meaning outside of human perspectives, then the world recovers its texture, the particular acts of verification and evaluation through which I grasp a dispersed experience resume their decisive importance, and knowledge and action, true and false, good and evil have something unquestionable about them precisely because I do not claim to find in them al>solute evidence. Metaphysical and moral consciousness dies upon contact with the absolute because, beyond the dull world of habitual or dormant consciousness, this consciousness is itself the living connection between myself and me and myself and others. Maurice Merleau-Ponty; Sense & Nonsense (p95)

One of my projects over the next few weeks is to try to wrap up a half year’s worth of wandering and exploration. Ironically, this will allow me to pick up some dangling threads. The main subjects I’ve been kicking around ‘inside’ are right now in an odd flux. After all, these subjects, folk psychology, metaphysical foundationalism, (what I term) supranatural solipsism, and, the social (constructionist) organization of heirophanies*, seem to me mixed up in something together I need to compress, wrap up and send away.

There’s a class of schema I have in mind’s eye, of vertical forms. My regard so depicted–or soon to be–is about verticality.

Noting this, in this post is the move into the, or maybe toward, the horizontal form. I’ve got the model set, but it will need to come at the end. Why? Because nothing I’ve been investigating has converted me away from the primariness of, (if you will,) the creative horizon.

*Breakthroughs into consciousness of the archetype of the Self; versioning here Eliade in terms of Analytic Psychology.

My impression? A humbling depiction.

* Alfred W. Roark Centennial Professor, Section of Integrative Biology, University of Texas
“The study of evolution of biotic diversity is the focus of my research. Most of my research concerns use of molecular genetic techniques to study relationships among populations, species, and higher taxa. Some of my general areas of interest are phylogenetic relationships, speciation patterns and mechanisms, molecular evolution (including the use of experimental systems), and the consequences of hybridization and hybrid zones. Although I am interested in and work on all organisms, most of my research involves amphibians, reptiles, fishes, molluscs, and viruses.”

x

For me, the image of a hovercraft springs up. Social constructionists zip around held above the surface by a column of downrushing air.

I’m of two minds when I try to locate social constructionism somewhere in my own personal catalogue of prejudices. From one cherished perspective, I favor the interplay of process, the phenomenographic, eros/logos, and intersubjectivity, which any mediation of knowledge requires. yes, it’s a mash-up for me!

Yet, I can contest my own perspective too, and do so from another cherished perspective, and do so even if I also cherish the impossibility of a foundational and idealistic and final meta-theory of knowledge. So: I would submit, among many possible submissions: certain knowings transcend their having been originally mediated socially; and, darnit, what knowledge is and means is essential, as is how it is valued and what the valuation is and is good for.

But, both submissions are merely biases. I’m mostly in alignment with all the currents posed to contest the possibility of a magical metaphysics, a metaphysics purported to be foundational and resident in a world behind the world. Furthermore, the same bias and personal antipathy goes against hyper-rationalism, and, what I like to call, the positivist master morality and, per force, its cocky post-metaphysics, (even if its origins are found in ancient unitary dreams!)

As for its critique of scientific foundationalism, it’s my opinion that scientific reasoning is clearly socially mediated, but that causal reasons can also be qualified and justified as being objective in scientific terms and for purposes constrained by those “knowledge-able” terms; where they are secured as certain or tentative truth claims. I think perspectivism requires variant domains. Other perspectives: naive realism is in the mix but isn’t the bowl; the percept exactly matches, again, within limits, and, as sign, is mediated. Except…(see note below).

I spend no time worrying about solipsism, nihilism, and ridiculous (read: false,) dichotomizations, such as the one that holds if there is no preeminent value, there can be no value whatsoever. Of course it helps nobody has proved anything to be preeminently valued, even by negation, and this goes for some doctrinaire social constructionists. !

Social constructionism allows and admits (for lack of a better term,) folk disciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity is better than transdisciplinarity. At its best, it does not at the very end of its researches suspiciously and ironically toss overboard the very discernment and knowledge it has mediated and derived, as-it-were. I’m old fashioned at least in hoping that the “ends” matter. Sometimes a reader may get the impression from SC’s meta-theoretical rationalizing social constructionism wants to be the end-all by ending all. I cut it slack right there and recall the hovering.

Doing the primer took me back to work by Kenneth Gergen. Dr. Gergen has generously made available much of his short work. I highly recommend, for starters:

The Place of the Psyche in a Constructed World

Qualitative Inquiry: Tensions and Transformations

The Self: Colonization in Psychology and Society

note–

“…have finally found myself compelled to give up the logic, fairly, squarely, and irrevocably. It has an imperishable use in human life, but that use is not to make us theoretically acquainted with the essential nature of reality. Reality, life, expedience, concreteness, immediacy, use what words you will, exceeds our logic, overflows and surrounds it.” -William James; A Pluralistic Universe

From a Batesonian perspective, it is the way we classify, make distinctions, and make sense of things that is fundamental. If it is the distinctions we ourselves make that are causes, then it is how we process information and map the territory that explains. Within this framework, any explanation or scientific activity becomes fundamentally recursive. It follows that if the world of mental process is recursive, then our descriptions of it should also be recursive and address the multiple layers of mutual influence in any relationship. Once it is understood that recursiveness is fundamental to the development of a science of human interacting systems, “the focus of explanation shifts from the world of matter to the world of form” (Bochner, 1981, p. 74). There are always different orders of recursion and different ways of slicing things up. Every picture can tell a multiplicity of stories.

Bateson believed that we should look for explanations in the ever larger units, rather than in the sort of microscopic reduction that constitutes explanations in the non-distinguishing world of physical things. He always called attention to the primacy of context in establishing meaning and to the multiple levels of meanings in any interaction. “In fact, the phenomenon of context and the closely related phenomenon of meaning defined a division between the hard sciences and this sort of science which I was trying to build” (Bateson, 1972, p. xvii). He proposed that “it is not the data itself that is important, but the process of mulling it over, loosely and then in great detail” (Bochner, 1981, p. 72). Bateson emphasized the importance of being as precise as possible, but never closing off any possibilities. He cautioned researchers not to end their research too early and stressed the value of knowing where one’s knowledge starts off and leaves off. When ideas are half-baked, he advised tying a knot in a handkerchief as a reminder “that the concepts behind them are vague and await analysis” (Bateson, 1972, p. 84).

Qualitative Research as Seen From a Batesonian Lens. Muriel Singer

We shall examine whether the perennial anxiety that accompanies imperial hegemony in the New World might be a compensatory gesture for the originary Ishmaelite fate of castoffs relentlessly clamoring for re-integration into the mainline genealogical history as the chosen people. In the insistent regularity with which those serviceable simplicities of self-identity reify, essentialize, and globalize cultural pluralities into manageable objects of expropriation, appropriation, capital, and hegemony, might there be some explanation for the current discursive/ideological New World Order as “One World,” with a shrill univocity steeped in absolutism and terror? Could this be a historic correlative of America’s perennial monadic syndrome? Could the current terror-inflected summons that stridently disallows any critique, deflection, difference, deviation, or divergence from the manic chase of other, equally aberrant jihadic monisms represent yet another episode in the anxious history of predictably recurrent exceptional events? Having imploded into the mirror reflection of its pursued object, U. S. American subject agency now appears to be living, yet again, as collective cultural self-reduction. In doing so, might it be enacting, once more, its regular oscillation between the primal errand of its Ishmaelite self-ostracism from the (Old) World, on the one hand, and the Ahab-like obsession of a furious quest as a rage for empire and a one-world new order, on the other?

Course description. Djelal Kadir
Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature, Penn. State Univ.
Absolute America

…just about nails it.