Unification
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[edit] What is unification?
I guess what I have been up to all these years is developing a unified framework for the social sciences and history, meaning social dynamics. Some sign that this is working is the fact that in this framework I can write an ethnography with the same theoretical framework and concepts (2004, with Johansen) as writing history (my 2009 Encyclopedia of Complexity Sciences 22pp entry). Both provide explanatory theories that are tested against longitudinal data.
[edit] Concepts
The basic concepts are those we use in verbal theories: social groups, for example; social roles, social rules and social preferences, constraints (implicational), power, interpretive language, causality, etc. Some are novel like Ed Hutchins terms for cognition: "Material anchors", "conceptual blends", etc. Or Dwight Read's "Instantiation," Murray Leaf's "Empirical formalism." His "Monism" refers to the unity of multiple phenomena, rejecting a privileged level of phenomena as essential for explanation.
[edit] Relations
Using networks we can identify group boundaries independently of named groups and members, identify roles independently of named roles and occupants, identify rules independently of verbal statements and examples, etc. "Networks" is not a concept about some special phenomenon, it simply refers to looking at relations, relationships, how things fit together in various ways that can be observed.
[edit] Models
So if our concepts are often pragmatic labels for phenomena observed (which can get very isoteric in many of the sciences), what separates our everyday intuitions and verbal arguments from measures than can be used "independently" of common sense to test our theories?
Ordinary term Relational term Intensive Extensive ------------- --------------- --------- --------- group structural cohesion k- size, number of elements cluster modularity density size role blocking positional relations number of occupants
[edit] Stable meanings
An intensive quality or property does not vary with sizes or numbers of objects: Red, k-cohesive. An extensive quality or property does varies with size or number
To get an intensive quality it is often necessary to NORMALIZE. With an intensive quality or NORMALIZATION can you COMPARE. Extensivity is also COMPARATIVE. Without one or the other you CANNOT compare in a way that is replicable.
Problem with Goodenough's notion of meaning or regularity is in distinctions like etic/emic. This privileges "emic" as the comparative unit of meaning, etic is variable, unstable. This doesn't work and blinds you into thinking for example, that concepts are internal, well defined, consistent but exemplars are imperfect, compromises, variable. This leads to thinking that behavior never conforms to the purity of cognitions. The cognitions then have to be broken into components of meaning, taxonomies to express precise differences. Applied to residence rules on Truk (Chuuk), for example, this leads you to disagree over the proper taxonomies, expression of rules, classifications. Leads Goodenough to see the problem of description as fallible, etic, and very different from the problem of comparison where a precise external criterion is applied. This way lies madness.
That frame is easily invalidated by the notion of relation. Maybe the residence rule relates to where are the relevant claims to use of property in the family, for example, not to which parent/whatever to live with. Maybe kinship terms are relative terms, products, like Brother OF Father rather than an intersection or union of component elements (male * senior generation * collateral).
[edit] Tracks
If you look at your experience, you tend to choose prototypes for approaches that are workable.
1956 Harold E. Driver An Integration of Functional, Evolutionary, and Historical Theory by Means of Correlations. - right track, relational.
1957 S.F. Nadel The Theory of Social Structure - right track, relational.
1965 J. Clyde Mitchell Social Networks in Urban Situations - wrong track, too fragmented, positivistic
1968 François Lorrain - right track, relational approach to networks, cognition, monist.
1968 Ward H. Goodenough Description and Comparison - wrong track, componential
... etc
---→ hopefully these choices lead to a coherent framework, e.g.,
2004 Douglas R. White and Ulla Johansen. Network Analysis and Ethnographic Problems.
2008 Douglas R. White. Dynamics of Human Behavior.
[edit] Consistency and Validity of Conclusions, Tests of multiple working hypothesis
consistency in ways to test and then write ethnography, history, comparison, evolution, causality
not separate description VERSUS comparison as Goodenough (1965) argued.
[edit] Scale and fractality
Some of the same generating principles occur at a range of different scales or sizes. An example is structural cohesion (White 2008). To find general principles it is often a good idea to collect as much data as possible at a given scale. At that scale there will also be "extensive" variation in sizes and numbers, and further properties of scale.
Among the questions that arise: How much of the variation that we see in particular sets of data are fluctuations around a common generating principle? How much a difference to these deviations make?
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