Posted by
Michael Agar on
Jun 08, 2006; 6:55pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/FW-SFI-Seminar-Complexity-Parallel-Computation-and-Statistical-Physics-tp521927p521972.html
On Jun 8, 2006, at 7:56 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
>
>
> The sentence "human agents are telic, they organize around
> imagined future states" sounds interesting, can you
> explain it a bit?
There's a lot to talk about here. For now, it's one of many problems
that fall out of the emergence of language/consciousness/culture,
creating issues for use of biological evolution as a model for social
theory. There's still a biological story to tell, but now it
interacts with a newer system that moves at a much faster pace, a
system where "variation" and "selection" follow rules that the agents
themselves create and change several times within a biological
reproductive cycle. I'm just reading Axelrod and Cohen's Harnessing
Complexity, a book that means to introduce a broader audience who are
thinking about organizations to complexity science. They organize the
book in sections on variation, interaction and selection and do a
nice job of introducing some of the differences that have to be
included in a social and cultural millieu. Long pedigree on this
issue with the Naturwissenschaft/Geisteswissenschaft debates, to use
an old English expression I learned in grad school (:.
> I also like the lens metaphor (a social
> theory as a conceptual system through which people see how
> their world works in a different way). If we use this
> metaphor, the original question was if there is a
> lens to see the whole system.
Yes, that's the utopian dream, born of a desire to find better social
theory that helps more comprehensively in applied work. (I like Kurt
Lewin's quote, there's nothing as practical as a good theory). In the
social realm, in my experience, narrow application of a single theory
usually fails, and once you get the picture of a specific situation
and how it works, the best you can do is patch together several
different theories in a kind of ad hoc eclectic way. In a way that's
the nomothetic/idiographic problem. Maybe it's possible to get past
the distinction and create idiographic theory. The "narrative/lens"
metaphor is an experiment in that direction. It has a pedigree--Erve
Goffman's "dramaturgical" perspective is a famous US example. Though
I only learned it a bit in conversation with a colleague, I think
Oevermann's "Objektive Hermeneutik" is another example in Germany,
because my colleague explained that "objective" was used in the sense
of a lens. I need to learn more about it.
>
> Probably you are right, the most promising route seems
> to be to identify common processes of interaction.
> Yet perhaps the basic common processes of social interaction
> are already known and carry well-known names:
> Power, Freedom, Authority and Domination (Weber's "Herrschaft"),
> Discipline, Peace, Solidarity, Commitment, Progress, Conflict,
> Resolution, Resistance, Rights, Obligations, Conformity,
> Innovation, Association (Weber's "Verband")
Weber's sociology is a major resource, along with Schutz's synthesis
of Weber and Husserl for some key foundations.
>
> The interesting thing about all these abstract concepts is
> that they become concrete, observable and measurable phenomena
> in Multi-Agent Systems.
My interest as well. The models can certainly serve as a thought
experiment lab, as Axelrod called them in an earlier book, to test a
stripped down argument about some aspect of the social world. More
interesting to me is whether there's a "minimal template" for a model
to test any argument about how the social world works, like the
question of initial network structure and distribution of risk that I
mentioned from the drug models.
> Max Weber for example defined power,
> authority, discipline, etc. in concrete terms of social
> interactions among persons (i.e. individual agents),
> for instance in the case of "Macht" (power)
> "Macht bedeutet jede Chance, innerhalb einer sozialen
> Beziehung den eigenen Willen auch gegen Widerstreben
> durchzusetzen" (power is the chance of an "agent" to
> realize the own will in a social action even against the
> resistance of others "agents").
Macht is what we need to do a job like this (:
Viele Gruesse
Mike
>
> -J.
>
>
>
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