Realist Claim Research Articles

Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After by Andrzej Gasiorek

Given the sources, antiquarian and dialect formulations occur frequently. There are many anticipations of what would later echo familiarly through Hardy’s own diction: prepositions used as prefixes (“upstayed” [Wordsworth] for supported), nouns pressed into service as verbs (“it fortuned” [Spenser]), prefixes upending the words to which they are attached (“uncrudded” and “uncomely” [Spenser], “unbegot” [Shakespeare]). As in Hardy’s poetry, the obsolete often sounds like idiosyncratic new coinage: “transmew” for “trans­ mute” (Spenser), “decore” for “decorate” (Drummond of Hawthornden). Hardy’s distinctive stylistic tics are well represented in lists that on occasion sound like the lexical equivalents of his practice of sketching out metrical schemes into which to fit as yet unwritten potential poems. As Pamela Dalziel has herself already suggested (see “Hardy’s Sexual Eva­ sions: The Evidence of the ‘Studies, Specimens &c.’ Notebook,” Victorian Poetry 31 (1993): 143-55), one of the notebook’s more intriguing features is its revelation of the young Hardy’s caution (not to say fastidiousness) in the transcription of phrases relating to sexual matters. Even though this odd miscellany was presumably intended for his eyes alone, dashes and, more frequently, the shorthand he had recently been learning are both called into service in the cause of transcriptional circumspection. While this is indubitably a “slim volume” (89 pages of text spaced gen­ erously to match the pagination of the notebook itself, 63 pages of identificatory annotations, and 7 pages of textual notes), its publication is a milestone in the expansion of knowledge about Hardy’s early shaping as a writer. Hardy specialists and general readers alike are fortunate that the task fell to two such accomplished textual scholars as Pamela Dalziel and Michael Millgate. keith wilson / University of Ottawa Andrzej Gasiorek, Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After (London: Edward Arnold, 1995). vi, 202. $18.95 (U.S.) paper. The topic of realism is presented ambivalently in modernism and postmod­ ernism. Virginia Woolf and James Joyce ranged themselves against the realistic naturalism of Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy. Postmodernists claim that there is no reality outside of language. All the more remarkable therefore is this exploration of a broad but judicious selection of post-war British fiction in which realism is positively presented as a creative mode, aware of its contradictions and branching out into new forms — for Gasiorek emphasizes that there are many realisms, not one Realism. Nevertheless, Realism is the reference point in the discussion of a selection of paired writers: Henry Green and Ivy Compton-Burnett as experimental 120 modernist precursors concerned with social themes; V.S. Naipaul and George Lamming as paired opposites in the context of postcolonialism; John Berger and Doris Lessing in the context of Socialism/Marxism; Angus Wilson and John Fowles in an exploration of the relation of contemporary fiction to social history; Angela Carter and Sara Maitland in feminist historical revisionism and the subjection of myth; and the trio Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, and Salman Rushdie in the confrontation of narrative with the postmodern apocalyptic denial of the representability of the historically real. Gasiorek’s discussion of Swift, Barnes, and Rushdie is the occasion for a confrontation with the postmodern prioritizing of language — a confronta­ tion that clarifies the most polemical aim of his book. A fairly vigorous defence of the claims of realism against postmodern thought emerges in the final sections. However, the main body of his book is a more disengaged exploration of the many dimensions and versions of realism in British post­ war fiction. Gasiorek’s pairings of authors reveal the contradictions within realism as well as its forms. Henry Green, an earlier modernist precursor of post­ war realism, is shown to combine concepts of impersonality — ideas that were emphasized by modernists like Hulme, Eliot, or Joyce and preserved through techniques of cinematic presentation requiring minimal dialogue — with thematic social concerns for losses of social position in the welfare state. Ivy Compton-Burnett presents a similar perspective upon the condition of England and the fall of powerful elite linked to an exploration of the role of language in mediating power. With V.S. Naipaul and George Lamming, however, Gasiorek rather dif­ fuses his thesis in a very critical opposition of Naipaul’s colonialist dismissal...

From observability to manipulability: Extending the inductive arguments for realism

In recent years there have been several attempts to construct inductive arguments for some version of scientific realism. Neither the characteristics of what would count as inductive evidence nor the conclusion to be inferred have been specified in ways that escape sceptical criticism. By introducing the pragmatic criterion of manipulative efficacy for a good theory and by sharpening the specification of the necessary inductive principle, the viability of a mutually supporting pair of argument forms are defended. It is shown that by the use of these forms, taken together, a sequence of inductive arguments could be constructed, given suitable cases histories to serve as evidence. It also shown that the best inductive argument for the most daring realist claim is the weakest when compared with similarly structured arguments for less daring claims.

Controversies in International Relations Theory: Realism and the Neoliberal Challenge (review)

Reviewed by: Controversies in International Relations Theory: Realism and the Neoliberal Challenge Holger Schmidt Controversies in International Relations Theory: Realism and the Neoliberal Challenge, edited by Charles W. Kegley. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. 374 p. $30.00/Paper. Like other seminal historical events of this century, the end of the Cold War provided a stimulus for students of world affairs to readjust the theoretical prisms through which they perceive international political events. Much like its object of study, international relations theory today is in a [End Page 194] state of transition. One symptom of this theoretical reassessment is the increasing criticism mounted against realism, the discipline’s dominant paradigm during the postwar era. Analyses of realism’s conceptual and empirical shortcomings have become a growth industry since the bipolar superpower confrontation of the Cold War has receded into history. Perhaps the most powerful contemporary alternative to realist conceptions of world politics is presented by scholars operating within the liberal tradition. The peaceful resolution of the US-Soviet geopolitical and ideological rivalry, the ensuing spread of capitalism and democracy to new areas of the globe, and the growing number of multilateral cooperative efforts have lent renewed credibility to liberalism’s emphasis on progress and change. Charles Kegley’s Controversies in International Relations Theory: Realism and the Neoliberal Challenge is a product of both the growing dissatisfaction with the limitations of the traditional realist framework and the current resurgence of liberal thinking. Reflecting the intellectual climate within the discipline, the volume aims at a critical examination of realism from a liberal perspective and tries to assess liberalism’s potential to advance scholars’ understanding of world affairs. In addition, the book attempts to stress continuities with past debates among students of international relations by tracing the origins of the contemporary contest between the discipline’s two main schools of thought. While Controversies in International Relations Theory is primarily designed as a liberal critique of the realist theoretical orthodoxy, the editor also attempts to demonstrate how the two approaches “overlap and reinforce each other” in order to pave the way for a possible future synthesis of liberal and realist insights. The book consists of five major parts. Part One, featuring such prominent authors as Michael Doyle, Joseph Grieco, Ole Holsti, and Kenneth Waltz, introduces the reader to the central tenets of modern realist and liberal thought and the different philosophical traditions from which the two approaches have emerged. These introductory essays set the stage for the main discussion in Parts Two to Four, in which various core issues and substantive problems in contemporary international affairs are examined in light of the two contending theoretical perspectives, focusing on the institutional, economic, military, and normative dimensions of world politics. The volume concludes with a look to the future of the realist-liberal debate. In keeping with the editor’s goal of correcting the past pro-realist bias within the discipline, the essays in Controversies in International [End Page 195] Relations Theory concentrate on highlighting realism’s conceptual and empirical shortcomings. On the conceptual level, realism is faulted for its narrow focus on security issues and great power rivalries, which, in Ole Holsti’s words, not only fails to “capture the complexities of contemporary international life but—blinds the analyst to the institutions, processes, and norms that permit cooperation and significantly mitigate some features of an anarchic system.” On the empirical level, Barry Hughes’ contribution on the European Union and Nicholas Onuf’s and Thomas Johnson’s essay on the so-called “democratic peace” examine two phenomena that seriously bring into question core realist assumptions. While the absence of armed conflict among democratic states challenges the realist assertion that unit-level factors, such as regime type, have no significant impact on which states do or do not go to war with each other, the Europeans’ ongoing attempts to form an ever closer union puzzle realists for two reasons: First, the continued transfer of authority from the state to the community level contradicts their proposition that states inherently seek to retain a maximum possible degree of political and economic independence. Second, the Europeans’ increased integrative efforts run counter to the realist claim that EC cooperation...

War, Peace, and the State of the State

Against the tenets of realist literature, the article argues that the main source of war in the last half-century is internally-derived, and resides in the nature of post-1945 states. Regional and temporal variations in the topography of war make suspect realist claims of state similarity and systemic explanations of war. It is not the security dilemma nor the international system, but the composition of state legitimacy and the characteristic of weak, strong, and failed states which explain war today. Regions populated by strong states, defined in terms of legitimacy, are arenas of peace, and regions of weak and failed states are a prime location of war.

The Ambivalence of Form: Lukacs, Freud and the Novel (review)

Reviewed by: The Ambivalence of Form: Lukács, Freud and the Novel David Suchoff Susan Derwin. The Ambivalence of Form: Lukács, Freud and the Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992. 208 pp. Susan Derwin’s critical object in The Ambivalence of Form: Lukács, Freud and the Novel is realism, and her achievement is to have linked novelistic narrative’s desire for the real to the affective desires of the fetish. The mimetic claim, Derwin shows, has a fetishistic origin in the split subject, whose modern origins, and the origins of the novel, are simultaneous. In a manner less historical but more tightly focused than the work of René Girard, which remains curiously unmentioned in this book, The Ambivalence of Form links Lukács’s early The Theory of the Novel (1916) with Freud’s Totem and Tabu (1913). Both texts, Derwin points out, map out an ideal identification with totality, and at the same time subvert the will to totality that mimesis presupposes. For Lukács, the will of a subject who thinks in terms of totality, in the novelistic age when totality is problematic, produces a poetics of ironic instability: Freud’s contemporary text, Derwin notes, examines a similar, destablizing notion of “Einheit” in which “the desire to be like the other, to imitate him, entails a desire to do away with the other . . . identical to the brutal egotism of neurosis.” The world-historical pessimism of Lukács, and psychological anthropology of Freud, Derwin shows, “actually stage the interplay between the assumption that mimesis is a viable mode of representation and the ironic subversion of this assumption.” Derwin fleshes out this notion in textual analysis of novels by Honoré de Balzac, Charlotte Brontë, Theodor Fontane, and Walker Percy. In what is rigorously analytical and dense but always clear theoretical prose and textual analysis, The Ambivalence of Form shows that the self-subversion of mimesis and irony Lukács saw as constitutive of the novel form, and the aggressive erotics of identification and the quest for wholeness described by Freud, cannot be separated from [End Page 241] one another in the reading process. Derwin cannily connects mimesis and the aggressive desires for a totality in question with male and female subject positions in Balzac’s La Recherche de l’Absolu, and with the irony of female self-staging in Fontane’s Frau Jenny Treibel, long a touchstone for discussions of realism in the German novel. The analysis of sado-masochism and the desire for wholeness in Percy’s The Second Coming beautifully destabilizes redemptive readings of that novel’s conclusion. The affective poetics of sado-masochistic desire and its relation to both mimesis and the process of identification Derwin develops here are a truly original and powerful contribution, whose traces are to be found throughout this book. The Ambivalence of Form bears comparison with Claudia Brodsky’s The Imposition of Form (1987), which examines the formal imposture of the realist claim to mimesis from a Kantian direction. While self-consciously separating itself from historical, contextual analysis, Derwin’s work also supports the combination between skepticism and realistic representation that Michael McKeon quite differently accounts for as an aspect of realistic narrative from the start in his The Origins of the English Novel (1987). Yet Derwin’s engagement with kindred theory remains largely implicit. The notion of “the ambivalence of form,” for instance, bears clear analogies to the early as well as late work of Theodor Adorno. The Dialectic of Enlightenment’s analysis of magic, representation and fetishism as origins of conceptual thought and literary form bear analogy to Derwin’s model, as does Adorno’s final work, Aesthetic Theory, where the fetish value of literary form and the self-critique built into artistic representation are linked. These connections are only touched upon in the briefest way, and there is no exploratory engagement with the later Lukács, whose essays on modernism explicitly rejected modernist narratives. The modernism excoriated by Lukács, moreover, highlighted precisely the radical kinds of attack on totalization which Derwin argues for convincingly as part of affective narrative structure of the realism Lukács preferred. Similarly, the powerful, central thesis of The Ambivalence of Form...

A security regime among democracies: cooperation among Iroquois nations

In precolonial and colonial North America five Iroquois nations, which previously had fought for generations, stopped wars among themselves and lived in peace for about 325 years. This history raises several questions: why did the Iroquois nations stop fighting each other; did the fact that each nation was a democracy have anything to do with the end of war among them; and what are the lessons of this peace for international relations scholars? A security regime formed by the Iroquois in 1450, known as the Iroquois League, accounts for the peace. Comparing the Iroquois League with the Concert of Europe indicates an important role for norms and institutionalization in ameliorating the security dilemma. Further, the five democratic nations that formed the Iroquois League exemplify Immanuel Kant's idea of a system for “perpetual peace.” Finally, the history of the Iroquois League challenges realist claims of cross-cultural and timeless validity.

Dispositional Knowing from an Ecological Perspective

A direct perception analysis of dispositional knozwng, based on an ecological approach that is grounded in the use of activity to get mind into the world, is presented. It is proposed that social dispositions such as dominance or cooperativeness can be directly perceived, as opposed to inferred, if they are embodied in relational activities that activate the disposition. The choice of the particular activity as a way of turning dispositions into perceivable social affordances is related to an evolutionarily oriented analysis of dispositions as evolved adaptive solutions for solving basic social problems such as mate selection and group formation. Objections to the possibility of direct perception that are based on claims of insufficient or deceptive information are countered by the introduction of event-activity tests, modeled after perturbation and bifurcation processes in dynamic systems formulations. Comparisons are then made between the ecological claims of realism, mutualism, and activity and aspects of current constructive models of dispositional knowing, such as Wright and Mischel's conditional hedge model and Trope's Bayesian inference approach.

The Relative-Gains Problem for International Cooperation

Modern realism claims that the fear that others will enjoy relatively greater benefits frequently impedes international cooperation. Recent articles in thisReviewby Duncan Snidal and Robert Powell modeled conditions under which the impact of relative gains varied. Joseph Grieco criticizes Snidal's model as based on assumptions that allow him to avoid, rather than confront, the realist arguments. He also argues that Powell's model, while constructive, ignores important additional sources of sensitivity to relative gains. In response, Powell discusses the value of alternative assumptions about preferences and constraints in international relations. Snidal defends his analysis and presents an additional proof to support the independence of his central result—the diminishing impact of relative gains with increasing numbers of states—from assumptions of concern to Grieco. Both responders emphasize their work as contributing to a contextually rich theory of international politics that builds on elements of both realism and neo-liberalism.

On Natural Properties in Metaphysics

Michael Dummett has characterized the primary claim of realism as being that sentences are objectively true. But even if he is right, so that it is at the level of sentences that realism's essence is revealed, realists have traditionally also had theses to advance about the components out of which sentences are built. One of these, of course, is the claim that at least some singular terms stand for entities which exist objectively and independently of mind. Another, the topic of this paper, is that at least some predicates stand for natural proper-ties; that is, that they record objective cleavages in nature, schisms in things independent of human psychology or convention, marking entirely mind-independent similarities between things. Historically, the importance in realist metaphysics of doctrines of natural properties will be obvious: in Plato's distinction between predicates like and pious which mark the Forms, and those like dirt and hair which do not; in Aristotle's contrast between predicates like man which stand for substantial forms, and those like musician orstatue which correspond to mere accidental unities or to artifacts; and in the consequent doctrines of species, genera, and real essence which run through the scholastics to the modems. But with Kant and the passing of traditional realism, and more so with the linguistic turn and the passing of traditional metaphysics in its entirety, doctrines of natural properties went rather out of fashion, and in the analytic tradition of this century they find few defenders. True, Quinton (1957) and Quine (1969) dabble with the natural, but both end up with an account too tainted with psychology to count as a true doctrine of natural properties in the present sense. Which leaves just a few isolated figures, such as the trope theorist Donald C. Williams (1953), as the last friends natural properties have. Or did, until quite recently. For as the linguistic turn loses impetus, metaphysics has been reborn within the analytic tradition and realists have re-embraced doctrines of natural properties. Keith Campbell (1990) and David Armstrong (1978) are prime exemplars of the trend. But nowhere are natural properties put to more sophisticated use than in the metaphysical system of David Lewis. This paper examines the reasons Lewis gives for believing in natural properties, and charts and evaluates the way he deploys them. In so doing, my discussion perforce engages with the detail of Lewis's system, but I trust the morals drawn are more general; that clarifying the standing of natural properties within the most comprehensive contemporary system of realist metaphysics sheds light on their significance for any system with reasonable claims to be an alternative.

Illusions and Knowing What Is Real

Geometrical illusions are displays that give false impressions that observers take to be accurate. They have traditionally been cited as evidence against the naive realist claim that people see the world as it "really" is. Such illusions, however, often depend on their being viewed from a single vantage point (Kennedy & Portal, 1990). In Gibsonian terms, they depend on the availability of impoverished information. In this study, spatial transformations were applied to line-length (Sander parallelogram) and area (Jastrow curves) illusions to provide information to observers about veridical size. In particular, the reversal of certain parts of the displays resulted in informative invariants that specified the veridical nature of the parts. Most observers were able to use the information.

Text: Origins and Reference

The conflict between formalist thinking and theories that view texts in their historical contexts serves as a starting point for the introduction of a cognitive view of literature. From this perspective language has full referential powers. The “referent” splits into two entities, however: things-in-themselves (in their material identity), which we cannot know, and things in their coded form, which are perceptually accessible. Readers' mnemonic potentials, a consequence of the bonding of perception and language, are adduced to show that texts originate in past interpretations of other texts and in personal experience and that consequently social forces and historical events are subsumed in the individual memory. In the cognitive light, memory becomes the ultimate metaphor, and the epistemological claim of realism regains its compelling force.

Objectivity is not Neutrality: Rhetoric vs. Practice in Peter Novick's That Noble Dream

In general, I believe that skepticism is revealing and not refutable, but that it does not vitiate the pursuit of objectivity. It is worth trying to bring one's beliefs, one's actions, and one's values more under the influence of an impersonal standpoint even without the assurance that this could not be revealed from a still more external standpoint as an illusion. In any case, we seem to have no choice but to make the attempt.... Objectivity and skepticism are closely related: both develop from the idea that there is a real world in which we are contained, and that appearances result from our interactions with the rest of it. We cannot accept these appearances uncritically, but must try to understand what our own constitution contributes to them. To do this we try to develop an idea of the world that includes an explanation of why it initially appears to us as it does. But this idea, since it is we who develop it, is likewise the product of interaction between us and the world, though the interaction is more complicated and more selfconscious than the original one. If the initial appearances cannot be relied upon because they depend on our constitution in ways that we do not fully understand, this more complex data should be open to the same doubts.... However often we may try to step outside of ourselves, something will have to stay behind the lens, something in us will determine the resulting picture, and this will give grounds for doubt that we are getting any closer to reality. The idea of objectivity thus seems to undermine itself.... I want both to defend the possibility of objective ascent [that is, of developing an impersonal standpoint, the from nowhere, a view of the world in which the self is not at the center but is included as merely one among many objects] and to understand its limits. We should keep in mind how incredible it is that such a thing is possible at all. We are encouraged these days to think of ourselves as contingent organisms arbitrarily thrown up by evolution. There is no reason in advance to expect a finite creature like that to be able to do more than accumulate information at the perceptual and conceptual level it occupies by nature. But apparently that is not how things are. Not only can we form the pure idea of a world which contains us and of which our impressions are a part, but we can give this idea a content which takes us very far from our original impressions.... The search for objective knowledge, because of its commitment to a realistic picture, is inescapably subject to skepticism and cannot refute it but must proceed under its shadow. Skepticism, in turn, is a problem only because of the realist claims of objectivity. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 7, 67-71.

Fanciful Arguments for Realism

i. Throughout the long history of the realism-idealism debate, the realist has encountered notorious difficulty in specifying clearly his notion of independence, when he claims that the world is independent of our perceptions and concepts. Michael Dummett has suggested a way that interprets realism as asemantic and epistemological, as much as a metaphysical, thesis.1 For him the realist's claim is that meaning must be defined in terms of truth conditions, and that truth here must be contrasted with verification or warranted assertibility. The realist takes his assertions to state that their truth conditions are satisfied, whether or not we are in a position to tell that they are. The independence in question is the irreducibility of truth to warrant, coupled with the analysis of meaning in terms of truth. Realism in this semantic sense must be thoroughgoing in order to have any plausibility. We cannot be realists about truth but not meaning. We cannot, as some contemporary philosophers seem to suggest,2 analyze meanings as given by justification conditions and then continue to contrast justification with truth. This leads to the absurd result that to assert that x is F is to assert that x is probably F but may not be. Since these assertions are not equivalent, if meaning is to be given by justification conditions, then truth must reduce to warranted assertibility as well. If we accept the antecedent but not the consequent, we must also renounce the equivalence in all but observational contexts between 'It is true that p' and 'p', since the latter would assert only justification conditions and the former truth. The semantic realist denies the antecedent as well as the consequent. Dummett, of course, has challenged the ultimate viability of the more thorough semantic realism. The basic problem for him is to

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature by Richard Rorty

494 BOOK REVIEWS Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. By RICHARD RoRTY: Princeton University Press, 1979. xv + 401 pp. $~0.00 cloth, $6.95 paper. The philosophical tradition is surely unique in the place its adherents have given to thinkers who reject not just reigning schools of thought but even the very enterprise commonly called philosophy. W0 have only to think of the influence of David Hume, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Martin Heidegger. Richard Ro1ty calls these thinkers " edifying philosophers "; and, although he asks no special status for his own work, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature qualifies as a major contribution to the literature of edification. Rorty sees philosophy as having been governed, particularly since Descartes , by a pre-occupation with discovering the foundations of knowledge and bewitched by the metaphor of mind as a mirror reflecting an autonomous nature. Insofar as philosophers have believed themselves to have a special mission to analyze, purify, and preserve the mirror, they have assumed for philosophy the position of a critic establishing principles for and setting limits to the sciences and other cultural enterprises. The position of this book is that the foundations cannot be found, that the mirror does not exist, and that philosophy has no rights to establish principles and set limits for human thought and activity. The great edifiers made it into the anthologies not by merely mocking the tradition, but by doing battle with the arguments of their more ambitious peers; and Rorty takes little time entering the fray with his predecessors and contemporaries. First he deals with the classical writers from Plato and Aristotle through Augustine and Aquinas to Locke and Kant and then moves on to the efforts of present-day analytic philosophers to put empirical psychology or language theory in the place of representational epistemology. There are no quick dismissals of any of these thinkers and movements. Rather they are handled carefully, respectfully and indeed laboriously with the result that the therapy for misgnided philosophy requires a great deal of intellectual effort on well-known philosophical puzzles. The attack on the mirror bewitchment leans heavily on the efforts of W.V.0. Quine against the language-fact distinction and of Wilfred Sellars against the myth of the given. With these important notions undermined, Rorty is ready to dismiss any correspondence theory of truth and any realist claims about objective readings of a world out-there-even if these come with Kantian provisos. When these old projects go, so does the pursuit of unified science. Rorty can, as a result, adopt a deterministic physicalism without a reductionism challenging treasured beliefs and practices in art, morality, or religion. Each can have its own historically conditioned, diverse , and changing method and structure. BOOK REVIEWS 495 What is left for philosophers if they, like everyone else, must give up the old hope for unadulterated truth and objectivity and if they can no longer play midwife to narrower enterprises? They can, in Michael Oakshott's expression, be simply but importantly " a voice in the conversation of mankind " without trying to stake out a secure fach for themselves. The principal models cited for this shift are Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and John Dewey, all of whom renounced knowledge as their aim for the sake of edification, "the project of finding new, better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking." What these ways were for them Rorty does not really say. The models he presents in detail are rather Hans-Georg Gadamer with his subtle negotiation of the hermeneutic circle and Jean-Paul Sartre with his insistence on being-for-itself as defining the world and its own place in it. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is one of the most interesting and challenging books which I have read in recent years. If for nothing else, it would be notable for combining a careful argument with an appreciative consideration of thinkers as diverse as Sellars and Quine on the one hand and Gadamer and Sartre on the other. No one who has witnessed the parochial quarrels among professional philosophers in the United States can fail to welcome this accomplishment. On the substantive level, Rorty disposes effectively of the imperial pretense...

Soziologische Relativität

Abstract Ethnomethodology criticises sociological objectivism in a double sense: a) concerning the idea of “objectively” given social facts; b) concerning the idea of objectivity as a realistic claim of common sense and scientific knowledge. The theoretical alternative presented by Garfinkel and his followers consists a) in an analysis of the interpretative procedures, by which common sense beliefs in the objectivity of reality are constituted; b) in the intention, to take practical reasoning not as a source, but as a topic of empirical study. The paper argues that while the proposed analysis of practical activities conveys a useful approach, its epistemological implications lead to inconsistencies and problematical consequences.

Notes on social indicators: Promises and potential

Widespread interest in social indicators—indeed, what may be characterized as a new social movement—has developed among both social scientists and policymakers. The concept of social indicators, however, continues to be diffuse and there are exaggerated claims of the utility of indicators. Deficiencies in both conceptualization and method limit the potential of indicators for such tasks as priority setting and program evaluation. Moreover, the development of social accounts, based on the analogy with economic accounts, is fallacious. Redirection in effort and more realistic claims can reduce the possibility of an eventual decline in work on indicators and enhance the value of the movement for both policymakers and social scientists concerned with the analysis and prediction of social change.

Some Notes on German Drama as National Commentary in the Seventeenth Century

THE claim of realism, once made for Grimmelshausen, has recently been denied after careful stylistic study.1 Paul Hankamer accepts the criticism of Alewyn and makes a more general judgement when he states that Grimmelshausen was not trying to paint a clear picture of the peasantry and soldiery of his time, but was concerned rather with an 'Urbild des Menschen ,2 This does not mean that the novelist tried to cut