By John G. Gunnell
During this insightful publication, exceptional political scientist John G. Gunnell explores the connection among social technology and philosophy, and the diversity of difficulties that experience attended this dating. Gunnell argues that social technological know-how has became to philosophy, specifically to parts reminiscent of the philosophy of technology and different websites of philosophical foundationalism, looking for cognitive id and the grounds for normative and empirical judgment. Gunnell's emphasis is on political and social concept and the theoretical structure of social phenomena. The Orders of Discourse could be of curiosity to political theorists, political philosophers, and social scientists.
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Extra resources for The Orders of Discourse
Example text
I also want to suggest that the manner in which the term has often been employed in social science and philosophy does not really correspond with what may more intuitively and con1monly be thought of as theory in an area such as natural science. The actual word is not intrinsically important. It is the identity of a concept, and certain kinds of discourse, that are at issue. Attempting to capture the title "theory" and the approbation that now, as opposed to in the nineteenth century, surrounds it is, however, often an important dimension of contesting the concept, such as in the case of Max Horkheimer's distinction between "traditional" and "critical" theory (1972).
At the south rim of the Grand Canyon there is a signpost describing the diverse "theories" about how this geological feature was formed. Yet on the contrary, on other occasions, theory refers to claims that have been largely accepted and structure conventional scientific belief and practice such as the theory of evolution, atomic theory, the theory of light, or the theory of relativity. The latter are close to one sense of what IZuhn meant by the concept of paradigm. Sometimes scientists simply talk about theories as general claims, or big ideas, as opposed to lower-level generalizations, and at times they use theory to refer to things that fall outside the realm of what they take, either at a particular time or essentially, to be directly observable.
There is no particular reason we should accord any special authority to the classical use of the term theoria) but it provides a starting point for exploring the idea of theory and suggests some of the features that I wish to en1phasize. For various reasons often having to do with the rise of modern empiricist philosophy, the term theory had, by the early nineteenth century, fallen into some disrepute and had taken on the often negative connotation of speculation and abstraction. " This was in an important sense the initiating dilemma in the institutionalization of the philosophy of science.