Tue, 18 Oct 1994 15:13:31 -0700 for <SOCGRAD@UCSD.EDU>
Date:         Tue, 18 Oct 94 17:48:58 EDT
From: Steve Harvey <HARVEY@uconnvm.uconn.edu>
Subject:      "depth" of knowledge, continued
To: SOCGRAD@UCSD.EDU
Since, in my last post, I didn't use the example that is most illustrative of
what I mean, I thought I would do so now. There is one interpretation of
Frankfurt School theory which maintains that bourgeois science is *merely* an
ideological legitimation of exploitation. Indeed, an ideological legitimation
of exploitation *is* embedded in it, but it is folly to say that it is *merely*
so. It is, rather, a very sophisticated package which includes tools and
models and insights which far exceed anything that could be devised by one
brilliant theorist attempting to create a humanistic science. The paradox is,
the more theorists attempt to break with that package, the more of its
sophistication they loose; the unwillingness to challenge it at all,
conversely, relegates us to the "iron cage" of functional rationality, and the
resultant relinquishment of substantive rationality (see Mannheim for a
discussion of the mutual exclusivity of the two). I'm not making a moral call
that one is "good" and one is "bad": I'm merely identifying the trade-off
between the two. Examples abound. So, in my original post, I pointed out that
this trade-off exists, and that when young ideas become dogma, they carry both
the liability of stifling fresh thought *and* the liability of being less well
developed. In a broader sense, they remain an asset, since dialogue between the
two camps is likely to ensue somewhere, somehow. But that benefit is in spite
of, rather than because of, the adamance of the individual adherents. I prefer,
and encourage, a more intentional embrace and facilitation of that process by
always placing fresh ideas into an immediate dialogue with established ones.
This may sound like what we always do, but not really. We tend, more often, to
embrace whatever is "in", and to pooh pooh whatever has been locally
discredited. At least, I've seen an amazing amount of that in my young career.

-steve