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167 S E S S I O N I V Organizers’ Opening Remarks Immanuel Wallerstein Iabsolutely agree that the various divisions within the social sciences, the socalled disciplines, no longer have an intellectual meaning and that intellectually we should think of them as part of a single unified domain that I call historical social science. Nonetheless, there are certain techniques that are associated with the historical disciplines and I shall pretend first to be an ethnographer, and then pretend to be a traditional historian. As an ethnographer, that is as somebody coming from the outside to a strange tribe and trying to figure out what is going on, I notice two things. First, in reading scholarly papers, I usually start by reading the bibliography. I find bibliographies are very revealing. Reading the bibliographies of these three papers, I notice that not a single item is cited on all three bibliographies. There are some authors who are replicated, but the items are different. This seems to me to validate the premise of this whole set of conferences, that in the three superdomains of social sciences, humanities, and the natural sciences , people read different things, use different languages; and even though they may be talking about the same thing, they do not read what the others say. The second thing I notice as an ethnographer is the tonalities of the three papers in regard to the subject matter. The first paper by Andrew Sayer on reductionism is rather negative about reductionism. In fact in the beginning half, he says that we all reject it these days in social science. Of course he shows that we verbally reject it, but in fact many of us still practice it. But nonetheless there is an intellectual rejection of this concept. I think this is largely shared by people in literary studies. 168 Jean Petitot’s paper is an attempt to salvage reductionism. He says that there have been simplified versions of reductionism in the sciences and they are not very good, but here is a much more sophisticated version of reductionism that is kind of legitimate. And Evan Thompson plays what I think of as the traditional role of the philosopher, which is to mediate among multiple forms of knowledge. He says basically that it is a non-problem because it is a dualism that is not real; that we are all reductionists and emergentists at the same time; it is co-evolution, etc. When I think back just fifty years to when I was a graduate student, those were not the tonalities, certainly not in a degree program in sociology at Columbia University, and we did not say that reductionism is bad. We basically were taught that reductionism is very good, but we had not yet figured out as sociologists how to do it as well as the physicists, but we would, we would. Which is of course what Prof. Petitot is telling us: someday we social scientists will finally figure out how to do it right. Now if I can change my hat to that of a historian of epistemological thought, it seems to me that there is an important shift. If we go back to the middle of the eighteenth century, the concept of the two cultures was invented in the so-called divorce between science and philosophy (by philosophy, what is really meant is the humanities). The split becomes institutionalized in the nineteenth century. The story of the relationship of science on the one hand and the humanities on the other and social sciences in the middle is the growing social and therefore intellectual dominance of science. Science triumphs, reaching an absolute pinnacle in the years after the Second World War when everybody says science is right. The rest of us are wrong or at least different. And the scientists certainly felt they were right. The social scientists were split between those who stuck with the humanities and were empathetic and hermeneutic and those who were very scientistic—the economists being at the head of the list of the super-scientistic. Then there begins to be a social reaction in the late 1960’s. I can explain it in terms of the shifting realities of the world-system, but I am not going to spend energy on that now. I observe it. There is the growth of complexity studies within the sciences that challenges Newtonian principles in ways that everybody here knows. Cultural [3.145.186.6] Project MUSE...

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