Abstract
This piece begins as an academic paper about what the social sciences are and it ends as a manifesto of what they ought to be. The message is thoroughly ideological, for ideology is defined as that ethical glue whereby is and ought are forged together into a coherent whole. In the first part, I shall provide a succinct but novel summary of a long and complicated argument recently developed elsewhere.1 In the second, I shall explore some implications of those thoughts. In neither case shall I draw anything but a rough caricature. But that may be just as well, for it is usually easier to see the prominent features in a caricature than in a fascimile reproduction.
Misled by me the critics assert that my ‘tu’ is an institution, that were it not for this fault of mine, they’d have known that the many in me are one, even though multiplied by the mirrors. The trouble is that once caught in the net the bird doesn’t know if he is himself or one of his too many duplicates.
(Eugenio Montale, ‘The Use of “Tu”’, from New Poems, New Directions, 1976.)
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Notes
G. Olsson, Birds in Egg, Ann Arbor, 1975.
Quoted in M. Horkheimer and T. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, New York, 1972, p. 7.
A. White, Modal Thinking, Ithaca, New York, 1975.
A. Kenny, ‘Practical Inference’, in Analysis 26 (1966), 72.
Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Oxford, 1888.
Note here the similarity in sound between the name ‘Odysseus’ and ‘Udeis’, the Greek word for nobody.
The two quotes from The Odyssey are from the translation by R. Fitzgerald, New York 1963, p. 157.
O. Paz, Marcel Duchamp or the Castle of Purity, London 1970, p. 32.
And as it is that “technology has become the great vehicle of reification The world tends to become the stuff of total administration, which absorbs even the administrators. The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself”. Quote from H. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, Boston 1964, pp. 168–69.
For recent expositions of this and related themes see, e.g., G. Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, New York, 1975; G. D. Martin, Language, Truth and Poetry, Edinburgh 1975; and J. Culler, Structuralist Poetics, Ithaca 1975.
B. F. Skinner, Walden Two, New York, 1948, p. 214; virtually the same wording is also in idem: Science and Human Behavior, New York, 1953, p. 6.
O. Paz, The Bow and the Lyre, New York, 1973, p. 38.
H. Bloom, A Map of Misreading, New York, 1975; and idem: Poetry and Repression, Ithaca, 1976.
L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, London, 1961.
A. Huxley, Literature and Science, London 1963, pp. 13–14.
L. Carroll, The Annotated Alice, New York 1960, pp. 268–69.
K. Marx, Capital, New York, 1967, Vol. I, p. 178.
A. Breton, ‘Reserves Quant à la Signification Historique des Investigations sur le Rêve’, Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution 4(1932), 9.
M. Foucault, The Order of Things, New York, 1973, p. 297.
F. Jameson, The Prison-House of Language, Princeton, 1974, p. 142 f.
E. M. Cioran, ‘The Trouble With Being Born’, in Antaeus 20(1976), 119.
Useful overviews are in A. Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, Ann Arbor, 1969; A. Balakian, Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute, New York, 1959; idem: André Breton, New York, 1971; W. Fowlie, Age of Surrealism, Bloomington, Indiana, 1960; F. Alguie, The Philosophy of Surrealism, Ann Arbor, 1969; J. H. Matthews, Surrealistic Poetry in France, Syracuse, 1969; H. S. Gershman, The Surrealistic Revolution in France, Ann Arbor, 1974; P. Ilie, The Surrealistic Mode in Spanish Literature, Ann Arbor, 1974; and M. Benedikt, The Poetry of Surrealism: An Anthology, Boston 1974.
M. Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund, Phullingen, 1975, p. 161. Also see H. -G. Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic, New Haven, 1976, Chap. 5.
P. Feyerabend, Against Method, London, 1975.
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© 1979 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Olsson, G. (1979). Social Science and Human Action or on Hitting Your Head Against the Ceiling of Language. In: Gale, S., Olsson, G. (eds) Philosophy in Geography. Theory and Decision Library, vol 20. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9394-5_13
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