Andrew’s version of the accusation of “normativity” can be levelled against any serious science. No physics, for instance, can proceed without that form of idealism. In cognition, without some form of idealism, we are left with cataloguing idiosyncracies, not formulating principles. The difference is whence the ideal emerges. To my mind, the concepts and the line between “madness” vs “sanity” is a line drawn in the sand without relation to any fundamental necessity except a social need. The Empty Category Principle, on the other hand, can only be evaluated on whether it follows from some other characteristic of the system, not whether it represents som division of the data that we can call Normal or Abnormal..

But then I swallowed the syntactic kool aid years ago and you can just ignore me if you like.

The “Cartesian idealism” of most of the aspects of cognitive science that I’ve been dealing with has always appeared to me as a means to a (mostly rather materialist) end. For instance, one thing that raises much ire is Chomsky’s competence/performance distinction, but I have not yet met a generative linguist who claims that a unification is undesirable or unnecessary, simply that theoretical syntax cannot proceed without the distinction. And that study in syntax doesn’t require the unification to proceed.

I have read a very little Haraway and am aware of the existence of the remainder but none of them seem to appear in the contexts in which I myself study, which is, specifically, psychocomputational models of linguistic cognition.

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php4?article_id=6496

Mandos, have you read any Bruno Latour, Gregory Batesan, Donna Haraway, or Steven Rose? Familiar with autopoesis, developmental systems theory, ecology of the mind, actor network theory, etc?

There are plenty of scientists (Haraway has PhD in biology from Yale; Rose is a neuroscientist) who explicitly disavow the kind of positivist framework you (seem to?) subscribe to.

Cognitive psychology isn’t normative?

Steven Rose is a strict materialist and leading neuroscientist and he detests cognitive science for its Cartesian idealism, ie, its normative BS. Google him. There’s tons online. Heck, start here.

‘Theory’ is a term which covers a wide variety of different things which have in common only the element of generalized conceptualization. The theory of concern to the present paper in the first place constitutes a ‘system’ and thereby differs from discrete ‘theories,’ that is, particularly generalizations about particular phenomena or classes of them. A theoretical system in the present sense is a body of logically interdependent generalized concepts of empirical reference. Such a system tends, ideally, to become ‘logically closed,’ to reach such a state of logical integration that very logical implication of any combination of propositions in the system is explicitly stated in some other proposition in the same system. (“The Present Position and Prospects of Systematic Theory in Sociology” in Essays in Sociological Theory, revised edition (1954), 212-3.)

It is this style of theory that Horkheimer is arguing against. That is, a form of logical positivism. On my reading, Parsons’ position is next to incoherent, even if we grant him a generous reading: that is, one that separates ‘reality’ from the ‘system’. Even in positivist epistemologies, there is a strong distinction between the description of reality and reality itself. It is the description qua system that is ‘logically closed’ and not ‘reality’ itself. You’re prone to making the slip between the thing and its description.

No one disputes that ‘reality’ is causally determined. The problem is that social reality is infinitely more complex than mere physical reality. It is comparably simple to name laws of physical reality; doing so for social reality is next to impossible. The problem is the complexity of the social — and, of course, that social objects, unlike tables, can act on the descriptions made of them. That human action is self-reflexive (or feedbacks on itself) renders its reality far more resistance to logical description: that is, a system of logically interdependent axioms, propositions, and conclusions derived through deduction. Contary to the dream of logical positivism, social reality doesn’t particularly resemble Euclidean geometry!

You’ll note, of course, that in the passage that riles you so much, Horkheimer is clearly refering to logical descriptions. He refers to a “closed causal system”. In a very strong sense, Horkeimer’s claim is that ‘traditional theory’ can only maintain the status quo because it neither draws upon nor contributes to an otherwise of the present. Political conclusions cannot be drawn from sociological theory.

And this is where Freud comes in. (But not only, of course.) While Freud is a strict materialist and can even be read as asserting an identity between mind and body, he nonetheless places a great deal of importance on the conversion of the real into the the imaginary and the symbolic. Neither of the latter two are constrained by logic. (The laws of physics, continuity and logic do not apply in dreams, for instance.) The point, for Horkheimer, is that critical theory attempts to actively contribute to the improvement of reality. In order to do so requires, at least implicitly, a comparison between the present and an otherwise to the present — that is, to an imaginary or a utopia.

Now, if traditional theory cannot account for an outside of the logically closed system (that is, the imaginary) it certainly cannot account for attempts to orient action towards something outside the system — that is, to engage in acts within the system that are determined from without the system.

(In Parsons’ defense: he wrote extensively on Freud. Also, as an aside, ‘epistemology’ refers to a ‘theory of knowledge’. The plural is, in my view, correct even if there is only one correct theory of knowledge. Which I don’t think there is.)