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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (26861)	8/19/2006 10:23:48 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 543355

Ah, I gather we will have to agree to disagree as to just how we agree to disagree. Makes sense. ;-) On nominalism, I just did a wikipedia search and it's not helpful. Lots of discussions concerning the contrast between "realism" and "nominalism." I agree. It's eye glazing over time. I was using it in a different sense, closer to the way the term is used in the social sciences. It comes up in discussions of just how to create and operationalize concepts. One side of the argument is that the accuracy of a concept depends on just how close its definition adheres to the generic form that is present in every instance. The wikipedia entry calls that "realism." Thus, if one is studying bureaucracy, the concept used must embody the essential components of bureaucracy. That's close to Tim's use of "one party rule." I termed his use "literalist" but "realist" or any number of other terms would have worked just as well. That's because the nominalist contention in debates about concepts is that (a) there is no generic form and thus (b) concept formation need only be as clear as possible as to its referent. So, in this vein, "bureaucracy" need only mean what the researcher tells you, very clearly, she means by it. Such clarity makes the study comparable to other studies of the same phenomenon because the reader knows, precisely, where differences lie. But I was being a bit sneaky as well. My basic philosophical starting points are in Richard Rorty's post-modernist version of pragmatism, which disavows universals. I tried to sneak a little in. Just because I had a bit of time and found it on the tip of my typing fingers.