Teorie vědy (časopis pro teorii vědy, techniky a komunikace)
2003
ročník XII /XXV/  
č. 4

Obsah:

7-58

John Holmwood: Problém reflexivity a vytěsnění explanace z teorií sociálního zkoumání
59-94

Jan Balon: Reflexivní aktér v současných teoriích sociálního jednání
95-106

William Outhwaite: Budoucnost společnosti
107-146

Hans Herbert Kögler: Kritická hermeneutika subjektivity: kulturální studia jako kritická sociální teorie

  RECENZE - REVIEWS

147-152

Jan Balon
Co je nového na Nové sociální teorii?
Steven Seidman a Jeffrey C. Alexander: The New Social Theory Reader – Contemporary Debates

 

 

John Holmwood
Problém reflexivity a vytěsnění explanace z teorií sociálního zkoumání
7-58

 

Abstract

 

This paper is concerned with self-conscious statements of social inquiry. A number of issues are involved, but they all turn upon what is held to be distinctive about social inquiry when compared with natural science. A central postulate of contemporary social theory is that social inquiry must always refer to the meanings of actors and their inherent capacity to reformulate meanings as a necessary condition of the adequacy of any account that is offered. This necessarily gives rise to the possibility of a different relationship between social inquirers and the objects of their inquiries from that which obtains in the natural sciences. Whereas in the latter, the relationship is a monologue, in social inquiry it can (and, for some, must) be conceived as a dialogue between partners, since reflexive awareness is a characteristic both of social inquirers and those whose actions are the objects of inquiry. The paper argues that attempts to ground social inquiry reflexively have failed. This failure, it is suggested, is associated with the displacement of explanation from theories of social inquiry, a displacement that is evident in the way in which, first, empirical reference and, then, logical coherence, are undermined as criteria of adequacy. It is argued that social inquiry should, indeed, be conceived as a dialogue, but that it is a mutual interest in explanation that makes dialogue possible (and, more specifically, that it is an orientation to explanation that constitutes the contribution of social inquiry to any dialogue). The displacement of explanation in reflexive social inquir(ies), then, is self-defeating of one of its avowed aims precisely because it undermines one of the conditions of dialogue.

 

 

Jan Balon
Reflexivní aktér v současných teoriích sociálního jednání
59-94

 

William Outhwaite
Budoucnost společnosti
95-106

 

Abstract

 

The concept of society has always been a problematic term, and in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries it has been exposed to a new wave of critical attacks. This paper has a dual focus. The first issue is whether we need a concept of society to make sense of our experience of our social world; the second concerns the transformations of social relations in advanced modernity/postmodernity, and whether these transformations have deprived the term society of its meaning. I shall argue, via a critical examination of the most serious and influential critiques of the concept society, that it has not lost its use, though the implicit link to the nation-state and to what Michael Billig has called ,banal nationalism‘ and Jan Aart Scholte ,methodological nationalism‘ must be questioned, especially in relation to the recent history of globalisation. We need a concept of society in order to make sense of many of the forces which structure our lives, and the interrelations between more specific social institutions and processes.

 

 

Hans Herbert Kögler
Kritická hermeneutika subjektivity: kulturální studia jako kritická sociální teorie
107-146

 

Abstract

 

A Critical Hermeneutics of Subjectivity: Cultural Studies as Critical Social Theory

 

In the following study Hans Herbert Kögler argues that the research practices commonly designated as “cultural studies” are the productive continuation of the epistemic interests pursued by the early Frankfurt School. His analysis opens with Horkheimer’s early project of a critical social theory, according to which depth-psychological mechanisms explain the integration of selves into society and constitute the basis for reflexivity and resistance. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, however, it is claimed that in late capitalism individuals have become unable to build up the psychic autonomy necessary for reflexive thought and the ground for resistance and critique is lost. With that result, the original project of a critical theory of society aiming at a reflexive understanding of power by the agents themselves becomes aporetic: Kögler tries to point a way out from this pessimistic impasse by turning to a hermeneutically inspired theory of symbolic mediation and its institutional realization in the project of cultural studies. He agrees with the core problem of cultural studies, which consists in a non-reductive mediation of agency and power. However, according to him the conception still lacks a developed conceptual framework; he supplements it with a theory of linguistic understanding that allows for the methodological reconciliation of power-shaped sense with reflexive and creative modes of interpretation. Thus, while cultural studies are analyses of power emphasizing that subjective self-understanding is embedded in power-shaped contexts, the potential to reflexive self-determination and creative self-interpretation is in the study represented equally.

 

 

RECENZE - REVIEWS

Jan Balon
Co je nového na Nové sociální teorii?
Steven Seidman a Jeffrey C. Alexander: The New Social Theory Reader – Contemporary Debates

147-152

 

Abstract

The following review informs about Steven Seidman’s and Jeffrey C. Alexander’s book The New Social Theory Reader and discusses their allegedly ,new’ definition of the subject matter of social theorising. The new areas of interest are considered in terms of the more traditional conceptions and compared with classical projects of social theory .