lessons learned from my colloquium

[intertribal]

so apparently my real theoretical fight is with the realists, not the rationalists, and they are not the same thing (yes, starting with the same letter and having similar connotations is not enough).  because you apparently cannot fight with rational choice.  it is the unbeatable ID, it is 42, it is God with a capital G.  give rationalists any situation, perhaps even situations that involve prehistoric plants, and they will tell you that it fits their theory.  they are magic.  they are the sacred cow, the undying worm. 

whatever.  realism it is.

*rolls eyes*

Comments

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

How so? I'm pretty sure there are still good reasons to be against rational choice theory, but perhaps that's different from rationalism in general? It's not like I'm going to claim that humans have no reason or choice, after all.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Because apparently RCT just says that people have a reason for what they do (whether or not the reason makes sense/is crazy/is ACTUALLY shaped by external/different factors doesn't matter, because in their own heads they're being rational) and thus they are rational, and... period.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

but...even the German phenomenology-descended social theorists imply that, and they pretty much believe in social determinism. social determinism of rational actors working to prevent the breakdown in social order that would lead us to some sort of Hobbesian human nature... What I think, is that their their theory only has part of it. Yes, we do that, we have the capacity for rational decision-making in this way. But we also have learned behavior, that works on a level prior to what we can rationalize. And we also have emotion, which is more complicated and harder to theorize. But we can tell I'm Peircean in theoretic background and therefore just created a trichotomy of pure feeling, versus force and reaction, versus relationships and signification.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Okay, well, I didn't get most of that, and I'm not comfortable with RCT, but... they would just explain everything that's learned or constructed as a "constraint" or whatever, something that shapes how you view what is rational, and nevertheless you're still acting according to what you see as the proper course of action for you in this moment of time.

Really, though, I've spent more time decrying realism and I've used them interchangeably. And not been aware of "expressive" rationality when I've disagreed with RCT's more instrumental features.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

You can ignore the part about German phenomenology if you like, sorry (it spawned The Social Construction of Reality that I wrote a post on long ago, and Conversation Analysis (we don't have a theory! All there is is subjectivity! We cannot know more than is publicly available! We analyze minute details of conversation structure because face-to-face conversation is the genesis of society and all social norms can be explained through it! Without conversational norms people would kill each other! They would hate! They would be selfish and cruel!). My point is that any theory that tries to explain human thought/behavior purely through rational processes is ignoring a large part of how those "constraints" work. Yes, they do shape how you view what is rational, but sometimes they shape pure reaction, gut-feelings, impulses, aesthetics, desires, many non-rational parts of our being. Things that are learned don't have to be rationally held assumptions. They can be part of our ways of perceiving and un-reflectively responding to the world. I think it's limiting to lump all of that into constraints. I don't think every action is a (rational) decision.

What's "expressive" rationality?

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

But if you limit your time horizon enough... to minutes, even... aren't impulses rational too? I don't really know, I'm just spouting. I am curious as to an example of an action that you don't think is a rational decision...?

Expressive rationality is like... making a stand, even though it would make more sense for you to cooperate with your higher-ups, because it's part of who you are/showing your principles/self-worth.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

Anything that's habitual is an action that isn't a rational decision, partly because it's not really a decision at all. You can't really contrast 'emotional decision' to 'rational decision' because you end up with 'an emotional decision is still a rational process, just based on emotions rather than fact' (or whatever). I'm talking about actions that aren't decisions at all. Feelings themselves. Gut reactions. Muscle memory. Aesthetic tastes. You can take these and rationalize them, try to figure out the 'reasons' they came to be as they are, but as actions, they do not come from rational processes. They are learned (learned animal behavior, i suppose, though with a complex idea of reward and punishment). They are embodied, even, if you like.

This is part of why Bourdieu is one of the strongest critics of Rational Choice Theory, because part of his 'practice theory' is the notion of "habitus." There is structure (sociocultural, economic, etc.), there is practice, and within individuals, structure is inculcated as habitus (in the mind/body). This sometimes can manifest as consciously held assumptions. More often, it is unconscious and habitual. Hence the name, sorta. This contrasts anthropological structuralism which only posits cultural structure, that is held to sort of determine individuals' behavior. Then you get the idea that objective reality is all kind of the same, and different cultures split it up into categories differently, and they work off of those categories (or assumptions), and that's why we're all different. This model is also synchronistic, ahistorical, deterministic, etc.

A more relativistic approach states that we have these categories because we have learned to perceive the world differently. We don't all have access to the same objective reality. That is, much in the same way that someone born with cataracts in their eyes who has them removed late in life will not have learned how to see--how to perceive depth or coordinate their eye movements--so we each in our cultural realms learn to perceive things differently, pay attention to different aspects of the world, conceive of life and time and power, etc. all differently. And it is this that is 'behind' our different categories and assumptions that we use to operate at a rational, logical, semantico-referential (symbolic) level. Not that it creates the categories necessarily--the categories, or rather, sensing how they are used and inferring them as we grow up, can themselves create ways of perceiving, habitual ways of thinking, etc. It's hard to make any more definite statement than that, though.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

Bourdieu would probably also say (in a much more complex and convoluted way than i'm about to, and so possibly i'll get it wrong) that the objectivist standpoint is in fact a way of perceiving the world that is itself grounded in a certain social position--one of power and dominance or at least leisure, where indeed the social world can seem to be a representation or performance, and social actors acting out roles, and many symbolic interactions occur, whereas when you are under the force of this structure, you react, you don't have the leisure to observe and reflect, that's a form of wealth, for better or worse...this is part of his argument i'm leaving out and one he returns to later in his life.

Bourdieu in his own words, if you're interested:

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

"Objectivism constitutes the social world as a spectacle offered to an observer who takes up a 'point of view' on the action and who, putting into the object the principles of his relation to the object, proceeds as if it were intended solely for knowledge and as if all the interactions within it were purely symbolic exchanges. [...] The theory of practice insists, contrary to positivist materialism, that the objects of knowledge are constructed, not passively recorded, and, contrary to intellectualist idealism, that the principle of this construction is the system of structured, structuring dispositions, the habitus, which is constituted in practice and is always oriented towards practical functions."

"The bringing to light of the presuppositions inherent in objectivist construction has paradoxically been delayed by the efforts of all those who, in linguistics as in anthropology, have sought to 'correct' the structuralist model by appealing to 'context' or 'situation' to account for variations, exceptions and accidents (instead of making them simple variants, absorbed into the structure, as the structuralists do). They have thus avoided a radical questioning of the objectivist model of thought, when, that is, they have not simply fallen back on to the free choice of a rootless, unattached, pure subject."

"The habitus, a product of history, produces individual and collective practices--more history--in accordance with the schemes generated by history. It ensures the active presence of past experiences, which, deposited in each organism in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action, tend to guarantee the 'correctness' of practices and their constancy over time, more reliably than all formal rules and explicit norms. This system of dispositions--a present past that tends to perpetuate itself into the future by reactivation in similarly structured practices, an internal law through which the law of external necessities, irreducible to immediate constraints, is constantly exerted--is the principle of the continuity and regularity which objectivism sees in social practices without being able to account for it; and also of the regulated transformations [...]."

"Through the habitus, the structure of which it is the product governs practice [...]. This infinite yet strictly limited generative capacity is difficult to understand only so long as one remains locked in the usual antinomies--which the habitus aims to transcend--of determinism and freedom, conditioning and creativity, consciousness and the unconscious, or the individual and society. Because the habitus is an infinite capacity for generating products--thoughts, perceptions, expressions and actions--whose limits are set by the historically and socially situated conditions of its production, the conditions and conditional freedom it provides is as remote from creation of unpredictable novelty as it is from simple mechanical reproduction of the original conditioning."

"The habitus--embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history--is the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product. [...] The habitus is a spontaneity without consciousness or will, opposed as much to the mechanical necessity of things without history in mechanistic theories as it is to the reflexive freedom of subjects 'without inertia' in rationalist theories."

"Even when they look like the realization of explicit ends, the strategies produced by the habitus and enabling agents to cope with unforeseen and constantly changing situations are only apparently determined by the future. If they seem to be oriented by anticipation of their own consequences, thereby encouraging the finalist illusion, this is because, always tending to reproduce the objective structures that produced them, they are determined by the past conditions of production of their principle of production, that is, by the already realized outcome of identical or interchangeable past practices, which coincides with their own outcome only to the extent that the structures within which they function are identical to or homologous with the objective structures of which they are the product."

god, i hadn't read that bourdieu since intro anthro...now i feel dumb

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

and considering my attachment to peirce, bourdieu, and bateson, I should probably even say that most of our decisions are not so rational. or that our thinking of what a decision is is flawed, and we do not actually make decisions in the manner we think of them when we analyze the considerations they must take into account. that we are in fact capable of taking those considerations into account through habit, through past experience, through learning. but also that we're capable of reflecting on them rationally, of rationalizing them.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

I had this argument with Jason long ago and it dwindled to nothing when he made clear this part, that the rationality only works of of whatever assumptions, and I want to hit myself over the head now for not getting the difference between that and the very sort of semiotic anthropology I supposedly study. It's remarkable (that I am so dense).

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

I like how "long ago" for me = any time before this semester. My life moves in eras. Epochs. Lol.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

*makes note of contrast w/ Rousseau, who apparently the pragmatists (incl. Peirce) loved, and also the other Romantics, who would place rationality with society/civilization and a human nature abstracted from that would be based in needs, passions, reactions to the environment, etc....*