Education, Culture and Critical Thinking by Ken Brown

Author:Ken Brown [Brown, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9780429856488
Google: OIyADwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 43329539
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

Linguistic-conceptual innovation and prediction in social science

Human decision-making is characterised by the existence of alternative courses of action which are implicit in the linguistic and conceptual rules according to which those decisions are made. And it is in the nature of these rules to be indicative rather than programmatic, the case argued by Searle when he asserts that money is whatever people choose to regard as money rather than anything that can be identified with various categories of objective correlates. There is no absolute criterion outside a particular mode of discourse or social practice of what constitutes an application, or a breach, of the rules. In other words, accurate prediction in human affairs is fortuitous, unless it is from the standpoint of an observer who shares participants' understandings of rules internal to a way of life:

...even given a specific set of initial conditions, one will still not be able to predict the outcome to a historical trend because the continuation or breaking off of that trend involves human decisions which are not determined by their antecedent conditions in the context of which the sense of calling them 'decisions' lies...the point is that such trends are in part the outcome of intentions and decisions of their participants. (Winch, 1958, p. 93)

Jack Goody and Ian Watt, in a discussion of the implications of literacy for social science, consider the cases of the Tiv people of Nigeria and the Gonja people of northern Ghana and their oral, non-literate, tradition of tribal 'genealogies.' In both cases, the interpretation of literate colonial administrators was in terms of the European tradition of historical-factual accounts of ancestry. Disagreements between the administration and tribesfolk about officially maintained written records of these oral traditions were frequent. In the case of the Gonja two whole divisions of the tribe disappeared over a 60 year period as a result of internal amalgamations and administrative boundary changes with resulting modifications in the number of tribal ancestors included in the oral version. Goody and Watt conclude:

What neither party realised was that in any society of this kind, changes take place which require a constant readjustment in the genealogies if they are to carry out their function as mnemonics of social relationships. (Goody and Watt, 1963, pp. 304-345)

In this case, the expectations of the colonial administrators were rooted in a literate tradition which took for granted a certain conception of an objective past and a corresponding function of the orally transmitted genealogy as a record of that past. This, of course, would be precisely the kind of thing which Europeans would regard as relevant to territorial claims. By contrast, Goody and Watt propose the idea of a 'structural amnesia' which enables non-literate communities to maintain a sense of traditional order because it does not depart too greatly from present experience. In tribal lore, it was largely the function of 'genealogies' to explicate present social relationships because within their world, the absence of a writing system precluded systematic comparisons between the present and any previous circumstances which greatly exceeded the direct testimony of living members of the group.

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