"I don't really understand what your objection is to using MN for doing
the social sciences. The little social science I am aware of is stuff
that basically follows these principles..." - Wayne
Which principles - the principles that insist the only things that can be studied by science are 'natural' things? Of course that is patently absurb to virtually all social scientists, who rarely if ever use the term MN. It is just as absurd as uplifting Reason as a universal concept that applies uniformly across human existence (i.e. modernism). There are multiple methods involved in social sciences, just as there are multiple methods involved in natural sciences. When this is agreed, the universality of MN, even in natural sciences, crumbles to the ground.
"if I found I had to survive as a lawyer or a sociologist, for some reason, MN is the toolbox I'm sure to bring with me and carry around where ever I went."
MN is a toolbox? Don't you mean scientific methods are the toolbox? If so, then yes, sociologists (and likely lawyers, who I cannot speak for), use scientific methods regularly too.
"For most of us, MN is what we have had to learn to do our jobs."
This sounds rather strange, if not tautological, certainly not enlightening. Limiting science to studying nature IN natural sciences - of course! So natural sciences use a methodology that is meant to study only nature? This is not a surprise; what is a surprise is the elevation into ideology!
Yes, I've been following your functional definitions at ASA, but sometimes these definitions and meanings are either not entirely clear or need more rigour. For example, someone tried to convince me that 'Darwinism' can be seen as synonymous with evolutionary biology. I responded that it didn't make sense to conflate the two. Yes, 'Darwinian' ideas, theories, methods, etc. are applied in biology. But 'Darwinism' is by definition an ideology, just as is 'naturalism' - otherwise one might just call it natural science or evolutionary biology. It seems to me that some subtelty is being lost between ideology and mere method when and if naturalism is considered as merely a method of doing science.
I am speaking of naturalism mainly as an ideology; this includes PN, MN, ON and TN. Sure, the conversation about naturalism has been complexified with all of these qualifiers. Maybe it helps our communication, maybe it sometimes confuses it. Still, I remain, a non-naturalistic (i.e. non-MN) sociologist until convinced otherwise.
Gregory
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Received on Sat Jul 21 12:30:32 2007
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Sat Jul 21 2007 - 12:30:33 EDT