Proponents of the view that social structures are ontologically distinct from the people in whose actions they are immanent have assumed that structures can stand in causal relations to individual practices. Were causality to be no more than Humean concomitance correlations between structure and practices would be unproblematic. But two prominent advocates of the ontological account of structures, Bhaskar and Giddens, have also espoused a powers theory of causality. According to that theory causation is brought about by the activity of (...) particulars, in the social psychological case, individuals of some sort. Consistence would demand that structure be those individuals. But neither Giddens nor Bhaskar wish to reify structure to the extent that would fit it for a role as a powerful particular. If only human beings can be powerful particulars in these contexts, the only way that structures can be real must be as properties of conversational interactions. Human action is social just in so far as people direct themselves to engage well in joint activities with others. (shrink)

In this interdisciplinary examination of the discourse of environmentalism, the authors explore the linguistic, philosophical, psychological and cultural-historical aspects of environmental discourse; rather than environmental phenomena themselves. This volume is not advocacy on environmentalism, rather, it is an analysis of the means of persuasion and the techniques of advocacy used by both sides of the environmental debate between `conservationists' and `conservatives'. The book includes an analysis of the concepts of time and space in their linguistic manifestations. Another theme is the (...) interdependencies of the natural world with political and economic institutions. (shrink)

Mereology is the logic of part—whole concepts as they are used in many different contexts. The old chemical metaphysics of atoms and molecules seems to fit classical mereology very well. However, when functional attributes are added to part specifications and quantum mechanical considerations are also added, the rules of classical mereology are breached in chemical discourses. A set theoretical alternative mereology is also found wanting. Molecular orbital theory requires a metaphysics of affordances that also stands outside classical mereology.

The question of whether social structures are efficacious can be tackled by examining how they are produced. There are roles and rules, and there are people. Only the latter have the necessary powers to generate social worlds as products. Changing the social world can be achieved only by changing the rules and customs active people follow. Selectionist models of change also draw our attention to rules. Finally, there are obstacles to social change in `reductions' - the minute social practices that (...) shape actual social orders. (shrink)

The philosophy of Wittgenstein is an unrivalled guide to the labyrinth of misleading pictures and intellectual illusions to which we are all prone, particularly when we try to think clearly about the topics that comprise the field of psychology. Wittgenstein and Psychology: A Practical Guide is a textbook exposition of Wittgenstein's insights to a scientific psychology. This book both introduces psychology students to the role and value of philosophical studies and enables philosophy students to see how Wittgenstein's insights reach out (...) beyond the domain of philosophy to reinvigorate a science. (shrink)

This paper widens the scope of our previous paper (Harré and Llored in Found Chem 13:63–76, 2011) by scrutinizing how whole/parts relations are involved in the study of molecules. In doing so, we point out two mereological fallacies which endanger both philosophical and chemical inferences. We also further explore how the concept of affordance is related to our mereological investigation. We then refer to quantum chemistry in order to pave the way for a new mereological approach for chemistry.

In Philosophical Instruments Daniel Rothbart argues that our tools are not just neutral intermediaries between humans and the natural world, but are devices that demand new ideas about reality.

It behooves a science to pay careful attention to its ontological assumptions, especially in cases where they are likely to be complex. Psychology seems to require both material states of humans as organisms, and symbolic productions. But we must be careful not to think that the grammars of the latter are some sort of superscience. The duality shows up strongly in the difference between skilled perfomances and their material enabling conditions. I argue that the dual ontology appears in a science (...) of psychology as a hybrid grammar. If we try to colonize one or the other side of the hybrid by terms from the other, the transplanted terms make no sense in their new surroundings. We find ourselves with a double or hybrid grammar and three main patterns of action to explain, causal, habitual and monitored. By assimilating the latter two under the symbolic ontology apparent problems dissolve. This is illustrated with a sketch of the sources and character of the sense of personal uniqueness. (shrink)

Language based criticisms of the intelligibility of the programme of neuropsychology have made use of the principle that words the meaning of which is established in the context of descriptions of aspects of whole persons cannot be used in that sense to ascribe properties to parts of human bodies. In particular neither human brains nor their parts think, are conscious, imagine, suffer and so on. Recently, Bennett and Hacker have presented the error as a mereological fallacy, because brains are parts (...) of persons. However, while brains are parts of human bodies it is not clear that they are parts of persons. I restyle the argument in terms of fields of family resemblances, in such a way that it makes sense to describe the hippocampus as an organ for remembering, but does not support the claim that neuroscience is core psychology. Such fields are networks of meanings linked by two principles. (1) Taxonomies of relevant body parts are determined by the psychological role they play in everyday human life. (2) Many body parts are also identified by the role they play as tools in human activities including psychological tasks. Arguments are developed to show that objections to the idea that brains and their constituent organs are tools are misplaced. Hybrid psychologies are possible. (shrink)

The philosophical problem of the utility andmeaning of essences for chemistry cannot beresolved by Wittgenstein's principle thatessence cannot explain use, because use isdisplayed in a field of family resemblances.The transition of chemical taxonomy fromvernacular and mystical based terms to theorybased terms stabilized as a unified descriptivetaxonomy, removes chemical discourse from itsconnection with the vernacular. The transitioncan be tracked using the Lockean concepts ofreal and nominal essences, and the changingpriorities between them. Analyzing propertiesdispositionally, initiating a search forgroundings strengthens the case for (...) a logicalasymmetry between descriptive and explanatorydiscourses. Taxonomy is now driven byexplanatory concepts, but not including thosefrom quantum chemistry. (shrink)

One way of studying emotions which is sensitive to cultural differences is to analyze the vocabularies people use to describe their own and other’s emotions, which can be called the local emotionology. Wittgenstein’s concepts of language game and family resemblance can be used in this project. The result of research in this mode is a three-factor account of emotions, involving bodily perturbations, judgments of meanings, and the social force of emotion displays. This treatment of a psychological phenomenon is typical of (...) recent conceptions of psychology as a hybrid science, linking cognitive, cultural, and physiological phenomena. It can be seen as a further development of the cognitive account of emotions that has appeared in the last century. (shrink)

This article strongly argues the priority of symbolic, especially discursive, action over the material order in the genesis of social things. What turns a piece of stuff into a social object is its embedment in a narrative construction. The attribution of an active or a passive role to things in relation to persons is thus essentially story-relative: nothing happens or exists in the social world unless it is framed by human performative activity. Drawing on Gibson's notion of `affordance', Harré affirms (...) that material things may be disposed towards many different usages, and may acquire multiple identities according to different narrative constructions, even though the range of their possible `existences' is constrained by certain material features. Objects acquire their full significance only if one takes account of their double role in both the `practical' order, which includes social arrangements for maintaining life, and the `expressive' order, which creates hierarchies of honour and status, and which enjoys priority over the former. Reasoning from a microsociological constructionist perspective, Harré restates his view that there is nothing else to social life but symbolic exchanges and joint management of meaning, including the meaning of things; the illusion that some thing is real is merely an effect of certain interpretational grammars which remain stable across the generations or even the centuries. (shrink)

This paper addresses the application of positioning theory, a new emerging theoretical scheme on the issue of cultural stereotyping. First, a critical conceptual analysis of the words‘cultural stereotype’is presented. Secondly, the basic tenets of positioning theory are outlined. Finally, it will be demonstrated how the framework of positioning theory can be used to analytically refine the concept of cultural stereotype. The main upshot of the article is that within social psychology, the concept of cultural stereotype is used in a conceptually (...) vague and blurred way and that, with the necessary conceptual refinements, other research-agendas on stereotypes will have to be tackled if social psychologists want to contribute anything to the societal efforts of changing stereotypes. (shrink)

Abstract: The argument for interpreting Wittgenstein's project as primarily therapeutic can be extended from the domain of intellectual pathologies that form the core of the Philosophical Investigations to the topics in On Certainty , carrying further Hutchinson's recent argument for the priority of therapy in Wittgenstein's project. In this article I discuss whether the line Hutchinson takes is extendable to the work of the Third Wittgenstein. For example, how does Wittgenstein's discussion of Moore's "refutation of idealism" in On Certainty work (...) as therapy when we think of it in "practice" terms? What practice? I suggest a further, but more tentative, step applying the therapeutic idea to seemingly insurmountable practical problems, where method is also at issue. (shrink)

Contribution to a symposium on Alan Chalmer's The Scientist’s Atom and the Philosopher’s Stone: How Science Succeeded and Philosophy Failed to Gain Knowledge of Atoms (Springer, Dordrecht, 2009).

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. (shrink)

Recent studies of Wittgenstein's later writing have made clear that they stand as a defence of two main ideas: that scepticism about the possibility of interpersonal discussions about our subjective feelings is misplaced and, as a seemingly startling corollary; that a mind state account of most 'mental activities' is incoherent. This leads to a great emphasis on skills and practices which, a fortiori, are definable only relationally, by reference to targets. In this paper I try to show that the 'computer' (...) analogue for the mind f ails on both of Wittgenstein's dimensions. There are no physiognomic language games in the computer centre, while the 'target' aspect of skill and practice concepts ties them in to a wholly human world. (shrink)

Critical Realism aims to be both philosophically sophisticated and morally forward looking. Unfortunately the accepted form that this point of view has taken is flawed in both these aims. However, close attention to realist formats in science and the constraints that are required to give a social psychological application of them makes possible a revision of the Critical Realist scheme strengthening its scientific claim and removing certain moral ambiguities in its applications. What follows is a schematic outline for an alternative (...) neo-Critical Realism. Attention to the plausibility of working models leads from a substantivalist conception of social reality to a Heraclitean social metaphysics. (shrink)

In the past decade, new, independent thinking in psychology has merged into an international movement that rejects the traditional "scientific" psychology and the reliance on experimental methodology. The movement is underpinned by the principle that human life is best understood through discourse. This "discursive" psychology has found adherents across all psychological disciplines and has ushered in a comprehensively revised understanding of the subject matter. Discursive Psychology in Practice puts these theoretical insights to work as it investigates concrete problems from decision (...) making, memory, and attribution to emotions, learning, and the self in a discursive light, thus mapping out a vision of a new psychology. Discursive Psychology in Practice will be invaluable to students and academics in all areas of psychology who have an interest in applying a discursive perspective. (shrink)

One of the roots of anti-science is an implausible account of experiments which opens up a seemingly unbridgeable gap between what it would be rational to believe on the basis of an empirical research programme and what scientists do believe. Post-modernists and others of a similar persuasion, for example Goodman, Rorty, Latour and Gergen, have marched into this alleged gap, insisting that experiments do not probe an independent reality, but create worlds to which they are perfectly tailored. In response I (...) argue that if experiments are understood as working models of parts of Nature, Nature domesticated, then there is no epistemic gap to fill. There are complexities with this thesis that can be resolved by developing a Bohrian account of the experiment as involving an indissoluble union of apparatus and Nature, giving us access, not to occurrent properties of the world but to affordances. (shrink)

Scientific realism asserts that the methods of science, combined with the intellectual powers of human beings can give us reliable knowledge of states of the world beyond the limits of perception. Among the varieties of realism, policy realism is based on the principle that taking plausible theories to be putative descriptions of actual states of affairs is the best way to design experiments and to advance our knowledge. We carve out the umwelt from the welt by the use of our (...) instruments and apparatus. The key procedure in science has been and still is the invention and testing of models---plausibility and empirical adequacy are the marks of a theory based on a model capable of supporting policy realism. (shrink)

Behavior, language, development, identity, and science—all of these phenomena are commonly characterized as 'social' in nature. But what does it mean to be 'social'? Is there any intrinsic 'mark' of the social shared by these phenomena? In the first book to shed light on this foundational question, twelve distinguished philosophers and social scientists from several disciplines debate the mark of the social. Their varied answers will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, psychologists, and anyone interested in the theoretical foundations (...) of the social sciences. (shrink)

Extra-philosophical influences were very important in shaping Wittgenstein's philosophical ruminations. The Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus is misunderstood unless it is seen as deriving from the pre-Machian physics of the German tradition, adapted to the problems Russell confronted Wittgenstein with. In like manner, particularly in relation to the discussions of meanings and rules, the philosophy of the Philosophical Investigations is shaped by the role played by a powerful religious sensibility in Wittgenstein's extraordinary and tormented life.

Science is as much defined by the local “instrumentarium,” the equipment available to an experimenter at a particular time and place, as by its discoveries and theories. Instruments are devices for detecting and measuring natural phenomena, linked causally to those aspects of nature they are used to record. Some are inorganic, made of glass and metal, while others are organic, the bodies and body parts of living or once living plants and animals. In contrast, pieces of apparatus are quite different (...) in the ways in which they work. They too can be organic or inorganic, but their role is to model things, process, structures, and so on in the natural world. They are used to study natural processes by simulating them in a user-friendly way. Keeping the distinction between instruments and apparatus in mind is crucial to understanding the power of the experimental method. (shrink)

The traditional ontology within which chemistry has developed involved various versions of a general substance/attribute scheme. Recently this has been challenged by two versions of Dynamism. One version is derived from the writings of A. N. Whitehead and the other from several sources, including G. Leibniz and I. Kant. Both involve the idea of flux of actual occasions. Unlike the former scheme, the latter involves a foundation of causal powers and the energetics of field theory. The situation has been made (...) more interesting because of the revival of trope theory, based on an ontology of particularized attributes. This notion is claimed to resolve philosophical problems about the nature of universals and of substances through the introduction of spatial and temporal sequences of tropes. While trope theory seems, at first sight, to work as an attractive alternative to substance/attribute close inspection shows that it is beset with difficulties that are more problematic that the dynamist ontology based on casual powers, dispositions and affordances. (shrink)