Can an Explanatory System be Consistent and Interesting?
limitatiosnandshortcomings says: October 2, 2009 at 6:10 pm At the risk of sounding dismissive: what exactly do you mean by ‘consistent’ here? It seems like you are reading it very strongly as something like ‘identical’… For example, I would say that if sociologist 1 says that x is important in generating a certain outcome while sociologists 2 says that y is important in securing that same outcome these seem to be perfectly capable of been consistent claims. Sociologist 2 is not saying that x is not important but is merely adding a further factor into the pot. And it seems perfectly possible, indeed likely, that we are learning something interesting from what sociologist 2 has to say: we did not know that y was important before. I’m reminded of Elias, with regard to those critics who argued that he ignored certain things. Apparently he used to say something like: yes, that adds to understanding civilizing processes, so lets add it to our explanation; I did not have time to say everythi
