Philosophical Grounding

[Dr. Zaus]

According to Burrell and Morgan (1979) when asking questions about how humans organize* there are a number of philosophical assumptions we make. I will outline them here so that we can better address and understand the implicit philosophical assumptions made when dealing with various ideas.


Each assumption has a spectrum of beliefs to which we often ascribe. This is not the Truth when it comes to philosophy; but it a good starting ground for discussion.

Ontology: "is there reality?"
-Answers
--Realism "there is a real, true, underpinning to our reality" (ie Rights are real, even if no one knows about them)
--Nominalism "reality is socially, subjectively, constructed" (ie Rights only exists because they are a story we tell each-other)


Epistemology: "can we know reality"?
-Answers
--Positivism "There are objective ways to know social truth" (ie there are psychological traits that generalize to all humans)
--anti-positivism "There is no way to be objective, all knowledge is contextual" (ie there are only impressions, which while something that can be shared are not Truth that can be generalized)

Human Nature: "Do Humans have Free Will"
-Answers
--Determinism: "The behavior of humans is determined by things outside of themselves; such as environment or genetics" (ie if we knew everything there is to know about genetics, psychology, and the present state of the human system we could predict everything everyone does)
--Voluntarism: "Humans make choices in all that they do, behavior is unpredictable and the ability to predict behavior is limited to physical-forces" (ie only in the case of physiological limitations is human free will limited; otherwise everyone has a choice to make in everything that they do)

Methodology: "how do we go about understanding how humans organize?"
-Answers
--Nomothetic: we seek generalizable truth in terms of psychological traits that cause behavior and sociological processes that determine how psychological traits interact with the world. (ie, create psychological scales, use quantitative models to figure out how humans will behave)
--Ideographic: we seek the lived experiences of individuals while ourselves experiencing the process and reflecting on our understanding (ie, create an ethnographic record of participant observations)

These are continuums. The first set of answers would have us believe that the social world works the same way as the world of physics: only unpredictable because of chaos in the universe. The second set of answers would have us believe that any social knowledge we have is illusory, and at best psychological-Truth is a history record of idiosyncratic anthropological behaviors of our day/time/place/society.


Here are some ideal-type sociological perspectives that may come from your answers to the above:

and how they map onto various philosophical assumptions:

Feel free to say where you fall and why, or if you disagree with any of these continuums and why. (or my interpretation of Burrell and Morgan if you like!)


I'm a critical theorist and as such I lean heavily toward the second sets of answers; but this is limited by my belief that there are material conditions under which workers suffer.

-me


*sociology/social-psychology/anthropology/political-science/comparative-religion/etc


source:

Burrell Morgan 1979 Sociological paradigms and organisational analysis

 

[Charles Kozierok]

Interesting.

I'm not really sure where I fall on this particular spectrum. That's made worse by my belief in simultaneous free will and determinism. (I think we all make choices of our own free will, but those choices are determined by things we cannot control or understand.)

 

[Dr. Zaus]

Interesting.

I'm not really sure where I fall on this particular spectrum. That's made worse by my belief in simultaneous free will and determinism. (I think we all make choices of our own free will, but those choices are determined by things we cannot control or understand.)

Here's a quick test:

If no one ever knew about human rights, would they still exist?

If yes: then some things are real, even if you can't see them.

If no: then the social-world is just some story we tell each other, and as real as we make it by living like it's real.

 

[Charles Kozierok]

I believe rights are a social construct.

I'd have a hard time coming up with any right that Americans consider "natural" or "god-given", that wasn't actually a right in some other society, not all of which were dysfunctional.

 

[Dr. Zaus]

I believe rights are a social construct.

I'd have a hard time coming up with any right that Americans consider "natural" or "god-given", that wasn't actually a right in some other society, not all of which were dysfunctional.

So what's the point of fighting for them, supporting them, etc?

 

[ThinClient]

So what's the point of fighting for them, supporting them, etc?

Preservation of our race, for some rights while other rights are a preservation of a quality of life that we perceive is owed to us.

 

[Dr. Zaus]

Preservation of our race, for some rights while other rights are a preservation of a quality of life that we perceive is owed to us.

Pure utilitarian then? No point of doing anything that might mitigate long term utility?

It seems there's some 'restructuring' of resources that would be quite maximizing from this perspective.

 

[ThinClient]

Pure utilitarian then? No point of doing anything that might mitigate long term utility?

It seems there's some 'restructuring' of resources that would be quite maximizing from this perspective.

I addressed neither long term nor short term goals.

 

[Greenman]

So what's the point of fighting for them, supporting them, etc?

You're late to the party, CK rage quit some time back, I doubt he'll be answering.
I can't really participate either, as I believe most philosophy to be tripe. I'll continue to read this though, as I might change my views if it's compelling enough.

 

[piasabird]

Sounds like a line of bull puckey. There is no such thing as free will for instance. Since I can not choose to be born into a rich family, I dont have free will and it does not exist.

In religion class we refer to the ability to make a decision "Morale Agency". Everyone has a different set of circumstances and conditions they live under. I could decide to insult my boss or come to work naked. But there would be repurcussions for these decisions we make. Maybe I can decide to take a given action, but there will be something good or bad that might occur and I might suffer some based on my actions.

For instance if a person dresses up as a Boston Terrorism bombing victim for Halloween public opinoin may require my employer to fire me. Even if we can make our own decisions, we can not always see the end result.

For every action their are consequences of that action.

 

[nanette1985]

Interesting. This sounds suspiciously like the religious banter my mennonite community used to ramble on about after a long day in the fields.

So, did the philosophers borrow this from religious thinkers, or the other way around?

 

[Dr. Zaus]

Interesting. This sounds suspiciously like the religious banter my mennonite community used to ramble on about after a long day in the fields.

So, did the philosophers borrow this from religious thinkers, or the other way around?

With how heavily paul paraphrases aristotle it's hard to say where the starting point is.

 

[Moonbeam]

I can't get anywhere with this. As soon as I see a question like whether rights exist if nobody knows about them I just trail off into outer space. How could nobody know that rights exist when they are self evident. That must mean that if you don't know that rights exist independent of opinion, then you have no self to which anything could be evident. That gets me to wondering who are people who have no self and what kind of delusion is it they suffer to think of themselves as having a self anyway. Perhaps for such folk the self is externalized, acquired by attachment and a sense of belonging. This would mean that truth is a shared opinion. About this time I forget what the question is.

 

[Moonbeam]

Perhaps you can help me answer because the language of the questions are very hard for me to understand:


"Realism "there is a real, true, underpinning to our reality" (ie Rights are real, even if no one knows about them)"

Would I be a realist if I said that I believe that a person who sleeps is real even if he doesn't know it and I am also real when asleep but I don't know it either and rights are real even if nobody knows about them although they only apply if you are a real human.

Nominalism "reality is socially, subjectively, constructed" (ie Rights only exists because they are a story we tell each-other)

Or would I be a Nominalist if I believe that societies are subjectively structured with a potential range of human inventions because we are not ants or bees, but socially adaptive, maybe realism with a long leash.

Positivism "There are objective ways to know social truth" (ie there are psychological traits that generalize to all humans)

I think I know what objective means, not to be pulled by unconscious motivation this way or that, but I don't know what social truth would refer to. At any rate, I believe we are all the same with the possibility there may be some folk who can't feel empathy for genetic reasons.


--anti-positivism "There is no way to be objective, all knowledge is contextual" (ie there are only impressions, which while something that can be shared are not Truth that can be generalized)

The issues here, for me, are two: How do you know your motives if you are unconscious of them when they exert their bias. How does the fact that knowledge is contextual affect whether it is objective. The problem would be, it seems to me, do you know the real context or do you only assume you do.
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--Human Nature: "Do Humans have Free Will"
-Answers
--Determinism: "The behavior of humans is determined by things outside of themselves; such as environment or genetics" (ie if we knew everything there is to know about genetics, psychology, and the present state of the human system we could predict everything everyone does)
I don't see how you can predict the outcome of things that happen at random. You have to jump on the wave of being and ride it. When you are what is there is nothing to determine. Determination is done in time. There's only the now in being.
--Voluntarism: "Humans make choices in all that they do, behavior is unpredictable and the ability to predict behavior is limited to physical-forces" (ie only in the case of physiological limitations is human free will limited; otherwise everyone has a choice to make in everything that they do)
Without time one either causes the universe or is what the universe is.
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Methodology: "how do we go about understanding how humans organize?"
-Answers
--Nomothetic: we seek generalizable truth in terms of psychological traits that cause behavior and sociological processes that determine how psychological traits interact with the world. (ie, create psychological scales, use quantitative models to figure out how humans will behave)
--Ideographic: we seek the lived experiences of individuals while ourselves experiencing the process and reflecting on our understanding (ie, create an ethnographic record of participant observations)

I believe the study of people is the study of how people react in a state of sleep. There aren't really questions like this, I would say, to people who are awake. Being is being is being is being, sort of like that.
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These are continuums. The first set of answers would have us believe that the social world works the same way as the world of physics: only unpredictable because of chaos in the universe. The second set of answers would have us believe that any social knowledge we have is illusory, and at best psychological-Truth is a history record of idiosyncratic anthropological behaviors of our day/time/place/society.


Here are some ideal-type sociological perspectives that may come from your answers to the above:

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These are my answers but I don't know what they mean. Perhaps you can tell me.