Re: Prigogine & Co.

I share Warren's concern about the mechanical application of physical
science models to social science, but I think Prigogine is more complex than
that.

I'm not an expert on physics, and I'm not about to defend Prigogine's
research, but my understanding of Prigogine is that he challenged both
simple reductionism and the simplistic use of the "Second Law of
Thermodynamics" which, when applied in a narrow way, leads some to conclude
that everything is just disintegrating, "winding down", so to speak. (That
view also opens the door for some people to assert that there must have been
a conscious Being who "wound it up" to begin with.)

If I remember correctly, Prigogine concluded that when systems deteriorate,
collapse, and disintegrate, there is a small part of it which is not only
retained, but actually has a higher level of complexity than before. If I'm
accurately expressing his view here, that would seem to be in opposition to
both the Mechanistic Optimism of the various "Modernization"
(pro-capitalist) ideologies which only see Joy in the future of capitalist
expansion, and also in opposition to the Mechanistic Pessimism of the
Post-Modernist ideologies (which also resolve to being pro-capitalist as
they lead to despair and inaction and the conclusion that there is no
qualitative change possible).

This is certainly different from some sociologist or economist trying to
predict social upheaval in West Asia based on watching some billiard balls
bounce into each other and then formulating some bizarre mathematical
formula that explains nothing about the real world.

It is noteworthy that when Prigogine released his findings in physics
research, no less a powerful media force than The New York Times, yup, the
Times, wrote an editorial about it, CAUTIONING observers to NOT attempt to
generalize those findings to the social world.....which meant: "Don't even
THINK about making major social change........challenging the order (of the
capitalist world) will only lead to continued disorder and not to a better
world later."  So obviously, the pro-capitalist world thought his research
was a bit of a challenge to the static, mechanical world view that they try
to foist on the general populace.

I don't have access to that editorial, but perhaps someone on WSN can find
it.........I'd like to read it again.

Alan Spector





----- Original Message -----
From: "Trichur Ganesh" <tganesh@stlawu.edu>
To: <wwagar@binghamton.edu>
Cc: <wsn@csf.colorado.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2003 7:40 PM
Subject: 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
>
>