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]

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.