Re: Prigogine & Co.

I disagree with those who think that reading Prigogine or Stengers is
tantamount to 'going down the reductionist road'.  There is nothing
reductionist about Prigogine, there is nothing reductionist about Stengers,
and I do not suffer from Wagar's experience of  inferiority complexes in
saying so.  In any case where does he read a 'shrinking of social phenomena to
the dimensions of the natural'?  In Wallerstein's use of the concept of
'bifurcation'?  But is that all that one may see in Prigogine?  Ganesh.

wwagar@binghamton.edu wrote:

>         I wish it were possible to dissuade social scientists from going
> down the reductionist road yet one more time.  The interest expressed in
> Prigogine by various world-systems scholars is just another example of an
> age-old determination to shrink social phenomena to the dimensions
> of natural phenomena, which began at least as long ago as the medieval
> schoolmen (Aquinas et al.) with their convoluted treatises on natural law.
>
>         From the very earliest origins of social science (once known as
> "social physics") the Great Minds have done their best to collapse
> the vast gulf between the behavior of atoms and the behavior of human
> beings in society.  I am a materialist, in the sense that I believe human
> beings are collections of atoms subject to the same vicissitudes as all
> other matter, but human beings, especially in their interactions, are
> immeasurably more complex, by so many orders of magnitude that even rough
> analogies between the two levels of being are almost certain to prove
> false.
>
>         Nevertheless, social scientists have always pursued the
> will-o-the-wisp of scientific exactitude, imagining that they could
> reduce the behavior of human beings in society to a set of laws or
> abstractions grounded in mathematics and/or the natural sciences.  So
> whether the inspiration is geometry, mechanics, gravity, the felicific
> calculus, the law of the three states, entropy, evolution, mutual aid,
> relativity, indeterminacy, organic systems theory, Godel's Proof, chaos,
> or whatever, and whether the basic science involved certifies the
> existence or non-existence of free will, social scientists have time and
> again taken the bait and tried to anchor the findings of their research
> in the natural sciences.
>
>         This is not to say that human beings in society do not behave in
> ways that can be measured, classified, trimmed to generalizations, and
> sometimes even predicted.  We are not ants, but we also exhibit
> patterns and regularities in our social behavior that deserve careful
> observation and analysis, including at the macroscopic level of
> world-systems.  But why this urge to turn social science into natural
> science or conflate the two?  What strange inferiority complex drives
> social scientists to ape "real" scientists?
>
>         As for this unlikely bedding-down of Habermas with Derrida, of a
> moralist with an amoralist, I'm with Gert.  Most of the countries of
> Europe belong to the core of the modern world-system, the rest are
> scrambling to join it, and any hope of a "kinder, gentler" Europe based
> on a vote that didn't take place in the Security Council on the issue
> of whether or not to pound Iraq into the dust in March as opposed to
> October, and with or without a few brigades of Frenchmen, is surely
> misplaced.  The E.U. may or may not emerge as the next hegemon, but it's
> the demise of the modern world-system, not the next chapter (if any) in
> its bloody career, that really matters.
>
>         Warren