ontology – Page 7

Ontology Ontical

However, we do not think ontology can or should be bracketed in the name of simply developing pragmatic concepts with which to investigate and intervene in politics and society. Instead, an ontological inquiry for us, focuses attention on the underlying presuppositions for any analysis of politics; it focuses on the ‘basic concepts’ mobilized by a discipline in any empirical and normative investigation.

An ontical inquiry focuses on particular types of objects and entities that are located within a particular domain or ‘region’ of phenomena, whereas an ontological inquiry concerns the categorical preconditions for such objects and their investigation …

… a political scientist might investigate the construction of national identiy in a variety of contexts, or she might examine the changing role of teachers and university lecturures in societies that are increasingly marked by new audit regimes and markets. If the researcher takes for granted the notions of ‘national identity’, ‘audit regime’ or the ‘market’, which are given in the practices themselves … then her research operates at the ontical level. If … the research inquires into the underlying presuppositions that determine what is to count as an identity or role, how these phenomena are to be studied, and that they exist at all, then the research incorporates an ontological dimension … the more the inquiry is directed at the categorical and existential preconditions of a practice or regime, the more the ontological dimension is foregrounded (108-9).

… for Heidegger, the ontological is the a priori or transcendentally constitutive features — what Heidegger calls ‘existential’ — that can be discerned from socially instituted, ontic or a posteriori life … But … Heidegger does speak … of Dasein as a unity of the ontological and ontic … I therefore worry about the seeming ease with which Laclau distinguishes the ethic-ontological level from the normative ontic level, as if one could somehow expunge or slough off the ontic from the ontological in ethical. Once cannot and, in my view, one should not. (Critchley in Laclau A Critical Reader, 2004: 120)

For G&H the importance of ontology cannont be underestimated.

Elster’s atomistic ontology leads him to falling back on a causal law necessity, and it is the lack of a robust ontological framework that hampers the self-interpretive hermeneutic analysis of Taylor, Winch and Bevir and Rhodes.

GH’s critical practice involves 3 intertwining logics, social, political and fantasmatic. Their ontological conditions:

1) All practices and regimes are discursive entities: an object’s identity is conferred by the particular discourses or systems of meaning within which it is constituted. In short social practices can coalesce into constellations or systems of practices which we call regimes, and both practices and regimes are located within a field of discursive social relations 109.

2) radical contingency: objects and subjects are marked by an ‘essential instability’,
contingency, historicity and precariousness and the constructed and political character of all social objectivity 11.

the constitutive failure of any objectivity to attain a full identity … (makes impossible the) fully consituted essence of a practice, regime or object, in the name of an irreducible negativity that cannot be reabsorbed 110.

… the more an inquiry is directed at the categorical and existential precondtions of a practice or regime, the more the ontological dimension is foregrounded 109.

All practices and regimes are discursive entities

… As this investigation requires an analysis of the entities and relationships that constitute the phenomena investigated, our ontical inquiry necessarily involves an ontological dimension: an ontical inquiry will therefore always involve the redescription of phenomena in terms of our presupposed ontology. And for us this task requires the employment of social, political, and fantasmatic logics 230.

Causal Mechanisms (Elster)

This is an excerpt

What distinguishes causal mechanisms from causal laws is the indeterminacy of the former, and the death knell this sounds for any attempt to make prediction a constitutive feature of social science explanation. More precisely, the lack of determinacy is understood as a serious epistemological obstacle to the elevation of mechanisms to the status of laws, whether this indeterminancy is linked to not knowing the identity of relevant triggering conditions, or to not knowing with sufficient precision the relative force of individual mechanisms acting simultaneously. Elster’s intervention thus decisively discredits one of the central pillars of the positivist paradigm by decoupling prediction, and thus a strict deductive-nomological form of reasoning, from social science explanation. While it may still be possible to offer predictions in social science, these predictions are understood to be constitutively precarious and, in any case, non-essential for purposes of explanation. It if for this reason that we feel justified in regarding his approach as conforming to a retroductive form of explanation in the social sciences (Glynos, Howarth, 2007 89).

… from the fact that X qua process is not reducible to the contextualized self-interpretations or intentions of subjects, it does not necessarily — or only — follow that X is independent of those contextualized self-interpretations or intentions. But this is precisely what is implied by Elster’s conception of causal mechanism. .. causal mechansims can be discussed entirely on their own, with no necessary internal connection to intentional mechanisms.

Of course, the subject-independent feature of causal mechanisms is very attractive from the perspective of a positivist programme seeking to import the causal law ideal and its correlative promise of (a certain conception of) objectivity into the social sciences. After all, one of the central ingredients of a natural science conception of causality is its subject-independence. The causal process is unaffected by what any of us think about it or do in relation to it. Take the law of gravitation for instance. At the very most, we as subjects can act in light of such causal laws, but we cannot modify, or be considered supports of, the laws themselves, whether intentionally or otherwise. The functioning of comparable processes (X) in the social sciences, however is parasitic upon human practices, in the sense that they are constitutively sustained and mediated by the discursive activity of subjects. If we insist on calling such a process a mechanism, then we must accept that, unlike laws, it has the property of fungibility, that is, it can suffer dissolution. At any point, the mechanism may find that it has lost its necessary support — intentional or otherwise — in the relevant subjects. Thus, mechanisms are not ‘proto’ laws that may one day be transofrmed into ‘proper’ causal laws. This is because the functioning of causal laws does not require the passage through the subject: the content of causal laws is not parasitic upon the subjects’ self-interpretations. This is why we prefer the term ‘logic’ to ‘mechanism’. The term logic better avoids the connotations of subject-independence that talk of causal laws and mechanisms suggest. At the same time, it allows us to maintain the central insight which promoted the turn to mechanisms in the first place, namely, that not all is reducible to the contextualized self-interpretations of subjects: logics are thus meant to capture the subject-dependent aspect of social processes, as well as aspects which are not reducible to the empirical context (Glynos, Howarth, 2007: 97).

While Elster’s theory of causal mechanisms responds to certain limitations of the causal law paradigm, he nevertheless accepts the search for laws as an ideal. And on of the reasons for this is the atomistic ontological grounding of his account, in which the world consists of discrete events, facts, and mechanisms. 103

The Logics pt2

… if naturalists offer the prospect of a causal explanation by subsuming the phenomena under universal laws or general mechanisms, and if hermeneuticists explain via the use of particular contextualized interpretations, our approach conceives of explanation in terms of a critical and articulated assemblage of logics. Our parsimonious theoretical grammar consisting of logics and dimensions thus contributes to a kind of ‘middle-range theorizing‘, which moves between empirical phenomena, consisting of self-interpretations and practices, and our underlying ontological premises. Our task is thus ‘to re-describe the ontical level in terms of distinctions brought about by [our] ontology’ (Laclau 2004 cited in Glynos et al: 164.)

Fantasmatic logic: the way the subject enjoys that covers over, conceals the radical contingency of social reality

… logics are always linked to a particular field of self-interpretations. Social logics, in particular, provide access to the practices under investigation, enabling us to grasp the point of a practice or institution, as well as the rules and structures that organize them … Social logics require therefore a ‘passage through the self-interpretations of subjects’, and they provide a bridge between description/characterization and explanation/critique 159.

In any fully-fledged critical explanation of a phenomenon, political and fantasmatic logics have to be articulated with a range of social logics together with the empirical contexts they inform and within which they function. The entire logic of explanation thus requires the passage through self-interpretations 160.

Ontological Framework: 2 key dimensions

The ontological framework that makes possible our approach has two key dimensions, which centre on the notion of subjectivity. These are what might be called the hermeneutic-structural and the poststructural dimensions. 162.

Hermeneutic-structural: centrality of self-interpretations of subjects in social science explanations. But discursive practices exhibit varying degrees of sedimentation, ranging from regimes and institutions to everyday social habits

While the social logics structuring them (discursive practices) are literally buoyed up by subjects — they do not exist except through the activity of subjects — they are not necessarily cognitively accessible to subjects, at least not immediately and without some form of intervention … logics can have significant explanatory and critical leverage independently of the consciously held self-interpretations of agents 162.

poststructural: highlights that social structures are never complete in themselves “by foregrounding the dislocatory nature of the symbolic order (the ‘real’ in Lacanian terms) and thus the possible emergence of subjectivity as such 162.

The hermenuetic-structural dimensions fails to exhaust our particular ontological framework. It is at this point that political and fantasmatic logics come into play, thus enabling us to generate critical accounts of the constitution and dissolution of social structures themselves. This is because they assist in the process of revealing and explaining the non-necessary character of social logics and the practices they sustain and animate. 162