The Concept of the Social in Uniting the Humanities and Social Sciences

Notes

Notes INTRODUCTION 1. The evidence for the claim that the elision is not only pervasive but systematic is overwhelming. It is clear not only in Strawson’s account of the history of philosophical analysis but in other major studies, notably Urmson 1956, Dummett 1993, and Soames 2003. 2. Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason (1976) is perhaps the most notable exception . Taylor’s work bears significantly on the problem of how the social might be represented in regard to problems otherwise addressed in the literature of analysis, though he does not quite get us to Strawson’s radical view of sociality and adheres to the essentialist individualism associated with analysis (see Taylor 1985b, especially his introductory remarks and chapter 9). Ollman (2003) offers an approach to the difference between the logic of individuality and the logic of sociality that provides a somewhat different way of addressing some of the questions related to theory that I address in this book. 3. Much of Garfinkel’s work on deliberative conversations and Erving Goffman’s on “stigma” can be read as documenting the effects of anticipated discursive futility, especially the “work” of covering, extending, or otherwise muting it. From that point of view, discourse is seen not merely as communicative action but as activity oriented to the fact that communication cannot succeed in producing a meeting of minds when the grounds of communication cannot themselves be addressed. What makes this incurable is that communication, understood as an exchange between persons, seems to involve forms of speech that are incompatible with the notion of the social that alone provides for selfreflection in the midst of communication. I try to show that this conclusion depends on a theory of communication and not on what goes on or can be expected to go on between persons. In other words, the futility expected of parties to any topical discourse is an inference from premises that I hope to show are false, and a different sense of how people are among people yields a different understanding of discourse and what is essentially incomplete about it (compare Garfinkel 1967; Goffman 1963). 442 Notes to Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1 1. We do not normally believe that the sum total of traits that might bear on one’s ability to “associate” with others amounts to the holistically definable existential trait of “being social”; yet being social is still thought of as a necessary condition of being recognizably human. Donald Davidson’s discussion of the necessary conditions of recognizing that another creature is thinking or has thoughts is a late expression of a theme that runs through much of his work on the relations among thought, speech, and action (2004b, 135–149). It is worthwhile comparing Davidson’s fairly cautious discussion of “triangulation ” (143, and with more detail in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective [2001d]) with Martin Heidegger’s (1968) discussion of the relations of object and thought. 2. Jacques Derrida’s (1976, 165–195) account of Rousseau’s essay on the origin of languages complicates the issue beyond my intentions, though it is important to understand the relations among Rousseau’s concepts. In his account of inequality, Rousseau speaks of pity with a special rhetorical emphasis, as motivating prior to reflection, and places it among characteristics that do not distinguish humans from animals: whatever force it has for a theory of sociality, it is not relevant to the constitution of society—only to its possibility. At most, it explains what The Social Contract takes for granted—namely, that those “entering” society will be able to trust that others are doing so with the same vulnerability imposed by the alienation of “natural powers.” It does not motivate people to associate; it merely makes possible the step from seeking protection to recognizing the general will, mediated by a first convention that has nothing to do with pity. This is how I interpret Rousseau’s introduction of the “two principles anterior to reason, of which one interests us ardently in our well-being and our self-preservation, and the other inspires in us a natural repugnance to see any sensitive being perish or suffer, principally [but not exclusively] our fellow men. It is from the conjunction and combination that our mind is able to make of these two principles, without the necessity of introducing that of sociability , that all the rules of natural right appear to me to flow: rules which reason is later forced to re-establish upon other foundations when, by its successive developments...