{"id":11381,"date":"2013-04-16T11:13:33","date_gmt":"2013-04-16T11:13:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nonesoblind.org\/blog\/?p=11381"},"modified":"2014-10-08T04:29:06","modified_gmt":"2014-10-08T04:29:06","slug":"whats-real-facts-constructions-and-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/whats-real-facts-constructions-and-reality\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s Real? Facts, Constructions, and Reality"},"content":{"rendered":"

The unexpected question that Ned Lebow raises in his book Forbidden Fruit<\/em>, and to which I alluded in the previous entry on Inevitability versus Contingency in the Course of History<\/a>, could be stated: \u201cWhat is real?\u201d More particularly, if I understand him, it is a question of whether, as one moves beyond hard, concrete \u201cfacts\u201d further into the realm of \u201cabstractions,\u201d one departs from the really real into something a good deal less real.<\/p>\n

In the course of exploring some of the philosophical issues raised by his \u201ccounter-factual\u201d explorations, Lebow takes the position (if I understand him correctly) that when we talk about society and politics, we have departed from \u201creality itself\u201d as soon as we get away from \u201cfirst-order \u2018facts.\u2019\u201d Our concepts are \u201cideational and subjective\u201d and somewhat \u201carbitrary.\u201d Our theories are reflections of \u201csocial construction,\u201d and \u201ccan only be true by convention. They \u201ctell us more about our view of the world than about the world itself.\u201d \u201cSocial \u2018facts\u2019 are reflections of the concepts we use to describe social reality, not of reality itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a statement that seems clearly to reject the reality of our abstractions about the human world, Lebow declares: \u201cThere is no such thing as a balance of power, a social class, or a tolerant society.\u201d<\/p>\n

These assertions bear upon my \u201cSwinging for the Fences\u201d project because my thesis is that there are things discernible \u2013but only barely, through glimpses and inferences\u2014that are a good deal more abstracted from \u201cfirst-order\u201d concrete facts than \u201cbalance of power\u201d or \u201csocial class,\u201d but that I maintain are deeply and importantly real. Maybe even more importantly real than the concrete \u201cfirst-order\u201d facts.<\/p>\n

(By the way, it is not only in the social realm that Lebow sees this issue: \u201cTemperature,\u201d he says, \u201cis undeniably a social construction, but is a measure of something observable and real: changes in temperature measure changes in the energy levels of molecules.\u201d I do wonder, incidentally, whether the notions of \u201cenergy levels\u201d \u2013or of \u201cmolecules,\u201d for that matter\u2014are any more factual than that of \u201ctemperature.\u201d)<\/p>\n

If I had a chance to ask Professor Lebow some questions, to see if he truly does believe that only the concrete is reality itself and that our abstractions concerning it are less real, here a few that I would ask to get at what\u2019s important for my \u201cSwinging for the Fences\u201d project:<\/p>\n

I\u2019d ask, for example: What\u2019s more real, a particular fireworks display in some small American town on the 4th of July, or something that could be called \u201cthe American tradition\u201d of exploding fireworks on the 4th of July?<\/p>\n

Walking along the street, one hears two people having a conversation. Is that what I imagine Professor Lebow would call a \u201cfirst-order\u201d concrete fact more real than \u201cthe English language\u201d?<\/p>\n

Getting still closer to the nature of my vision of an important dimension of how things work in the human world, I\u2019d ask two other questions:<\/p>\n

One of them is this: There are a great many human beings walking around on this planet. Are they more real than the human genome? (I\u2019d say that in some ways, the genome is a more fundamental reality than any of us who are temporary embodiments of it.)<\/p>\n

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The other question: If we know an individual, and observe a wide assortment of his actions and statements, which show a degree of consistency in their nature and quality, can we speak of this person\u2019s \u201ccharacter\u201d? And is that character less real \u2013or perhaps more real?\u2014than the individual behaviors from which we inferred the underlying \u201ccharacter\u201d of the man?<\/p>\n

My \u201cSwinging for the Fences\u201d project is an attempt to infer something large, and for that reason \u201cabstracted\u201d from the concrete level of our perception, using concepts that are parallel in nature to the more abstract elements of those four questions, above.<\/p>\n

As with the fireworks tradition, and the English language, I am focusing on the patterns that get transmitted through time in cultural systems.<\/p>\n

As with the genome, in \u201cSwinging for the Fences\u201d I will be arguing that the pattern is more fundamentally real \u2013meaning a more fundamental determinant of ongoing reality– than its temporary embodiments.<\/p>\n

(I say that just as a hen has been described as an egg\u2019s way of making another egg, so an individual human being can be regarded as the culture\u2019s way of perpetuating the cultural pattern.)<\/p>\n

As with the issue of an individual\u2019s character \u2013the \u201cspirit\u201d that\u2019s expressed in the various particular behaviors of the person\u2014I will be tracing an element of \u201cspirit\u201d that operates in cultural systems through the generations.<\/p>\n

While Professor Lebow, if I understand him correctly, is asserting that as soon as we get away from \u201cfirst-order \u2018facts,\u2019\u201d we have departed from \u201creality itself,\u201d I am declaring that a most fundamental dimension of human reality involves patterns whose mechanisms and character and effects can only be inferred from their imprint on many more specific events. They exist, therefore, at a level \u201cabstracted\u201d from that of our usual daily perception. (More abstracted, in some ways, tan any other explanatory concepts of systemic forces I\u2019ve come across, or come up with myself, in a half century of investigation.) <\/p>\n

That\u2019s why I\u2019m interested in confronting the challenge that Professor Lebow\u2019s notions seem to pose to my \u201cSwinging for the Fences\u201d enterprise.
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The unexpected question that Ned Lebow raises in his book Forbidden Fruit, and to which I alluded in the previous entry on Inevitability versus Contingency in the Course of History, could be stated: \u201cWhat is real?\u201d More particularly, if I understand him, it is a question of whether, as one moves beyond hard, concrete \u201cfacts\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11381"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11381"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14093,"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11381\/revisions\/14093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}