How to Think About Civilizations - The Watson Institute for ...

There is, however, another option. Instead of treating the four quadrants of my
matrix as absolute locations, we might embrace what Andrew Abbott (2001:12) calls the
“indexicality” of social life, including academic life: the notion that our most important
commitments are only made meaningful by their opposition and contrast to other
commitments in the local environment. For example, Abbott points out that, despite all
the ink spilled within the social sciences distinguishing between social determinism and
individual freedom, all social scientists are basically on the same side of this issue when
contrasted to others outside of the social sciences:
Social scientists, broadly speaking, think of human social behavior
as determined, indeed determined enough, irrespective of human
volition, to be worth thinking about rigorously and
comprehensively. Hence, they are determinists by comparison with
those who believe that people are completely free to act as they
please and that they are therefore only loosely scientizable (ibid.:
202).
Freedom/determinism, then, is not an absolute or categorical distinction between two
firm and abstract positions. It is instead a distinction that replicates itself in a selfsimilar,
or fractal, way: first we have the division between social scientists
(determinism) and others (freedom), and then we have the repetition of the division
within the camp of social scientists (structure vs. agency, in contemporary parlance). But
this also means that a commitment to one or another side of a distinction like this is less
of an absolute planting of a flag in a piece of conceptual territory, and more of a gesture
in a certain direction: a way of contrasting oneself to a set of local interlocutors.
So I suggest that we should treat attribute-ontology/process-ontology and
scholarly
specification/participant specification as indexical, fractally-repeating
How to Think About Civilizations • P. T. Jackson • Page 28