Subject: RE: BHA: Description in social science
Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2003 14:01:01 -0500


Hi Emrah and Steve,

This is a comment only to the first part of Emrah's response, which included links to two essays by Charles Tilly (thanks for those links, Emrah).  I read Tilly's essays as implying that the simple dichotomy between description and explantion is too thin.  I say this, because Tilly seems to provide a "thicker" categorization of verbal accounts.  In "The Trouble with Stories," he gives a "ladder" of types of accounts, which are, from the top down: 

 superior stories,
 contextualized stories,
 generated stories, and 
 non-story processes.  

Going from the top to the bottom he describes as a movement toward "explanation," and going from the bottom to the top is a movement toward "enlightenment." 

In his later paper, "Reasons Why," Tilly uses the same four rungs on the ladder, but gives a different typology, one whose relationship with the the earlier three types of stories and one non-story is not spelled out.  He presents this later typology as the cells created by a cross-cutting dichotomy:

				Popular			specialized

Formulas			conventions			codified justifications

Cause-effect accounts	explanatory stories	technical accounts

Although the other types do not match up neatly, there is a close correspondence between "technical account" (in the second typology) and "non-story processes" (in the first "ladder" typology.  I suggest that it is only in these kinds of accounts that the distinction between description and explanation makes much sense.  As one moves to the other categories in either typology, towards one or another kind of story, convention, or codified justification, the line between description and explanation becomes blurred, if not invisible.

In technical accounts given in terms of non-story processes, the significance of the distinction varies, depending upon the paradigm or theory which informs the account.

Best regards,

Dick 



  

-----Original Message-----
From: Emrah Goker [mailto:emrah_goker-AT-hotmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, November 06, 2003 5:21 PM
To: bhaskar-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU
Subject: Re: BHA: Description in social science


Dear Steve,

I don't know if this will be helpful:

Here are two recent articles on storytelling and its relation to explanation 
by Charles Tilly from our faculty. Chuck is a relational realist, so has a 
lot of reservations against dispositional/subjectivist accounts, most of 
which (I'd say) are in line with the British school of critical realism.

"The Trouble With Stories" http://www.columbia.edu/~eg577/Stories.doc

"Reasons Why"
http://www.columbia.edu/~eg577/Why.doc

>From a very different tradition, the post-Althusserian school of 
>"postmodern
materialism", based in U. of Massachusetts, Amherst, and represented mainly 
by the writings of J.K. Gibson-Graham, Stephen A. Resnick, and Richard D. 
Wolff, holds that explanation in terms of pinpointing causal paths and 
exposing mechanisms is impossible, all economists can do, according to them, 
is storytelling. I'm not sure whether their take on epistemology is what you 
look for in terms of "description". Two key books:

Postmodern materialism and the future of Marxist theory: essays in the 
Althusserian tradition, edited by Antonio Callari and David F. Ruccio.

Re/presenting class: essays in postmodern Marxism, edited by J.K. 
Gibson-Graham, Stephen Resnick, and Richard Wolff.

Again, tangentially, the emerging fraction of social movement literature 
(here in the US) which gives epistemological priority to activists' emotions 
and storytelling, might also give you a lead. Another member of our faculty, 
Francesca Polletta, is one of the leading figures in that field. You can 
check the theoretical sections of these two recent books:

Passionate politics: emotions and social movements, edited by Jeff Goodwin, 
James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta.

Freedom is an endless meeting: democracy in American social movements, by 
Francesca Polletta.


Best,

Emrah Goker
Columbia University, Department of Sociology


>Dear all
>
>I am trying to think through the idea that the provision of an adequate
>explanation requires an adequate description. Whilst there is plenty of 
>literature on explanation in social science, there seems to be little on 
>description. Can anyone help me out here?
>
>Regards
>
>Steve

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