…how time slips away. I was shocked to realize that I hadn’t written here for a full month. School starting and getting ready for a job interview have proven more distracting than I realized.
My esteemed co-author and I have been talking more over the last ten days or so about our article (ah, and that was another slowing factor: we didn’t get into the Philosophy of Social Science Roundtable, but have decided to soldier on with this project nonetheless), and making some headway. What we’ve got, really, are some argumentative moments that I think we could stitch together now into a coherent piece. I think we’ll try to do that over the next couple of months, with the expectation (such has been our experience) that the project will change substantially another time or two in the process. Basically, in exploring each issue we find ourselves driven back into more fundamental concerns. Seems like philosophy probably should work that way, though it can be a little confusing even to the authors at times. So in this case, what began as a contribution to the naturalist vs. normativist debate on whether the concept of a norm has anything to contribute to social science and the philosophy of social science is turning into a disquisition on the relationship between how things make sense to human beings and how their behavior fits into the causal nexus of the physical universe, and further how social science and philosophy ought to make sense of that relationship. As I said, we’ll get some thoughts up sometime here in February.
February 4, 2008 at 5:00 am
Ok, so a change in directions. Good, that should mean that the project is progressing. I’m not sure, at the moment, what the connection is between how people make sense of things and how their behavior fits into the causal nexus of the physical universe. Presumably you’ll be exploring that in future blogs.