Vulnerabilities of Social Structures - The Black Vault

Nevertheless, the continuing ajplied as well as theoretical goal of thebook is to move, wherever possible, beyond examining visible but isolated socialeffects, and toward seeing these effects within theof society which civil defense planners must attempt to address.v rger patterns and processesThese largerpatterns and processes exist at a level of analysis beyond individual unit acts ofbehavior, even though they must be studied in both normal and crisis times throughthese unit acts. In some cases, the contributors to this book take social structuraland institutional dimensions and variables as levels of discourse upon which tobegin immediate analysis of nuclear attack effects.For them and other socialscientists, these dimensions and variables can be taken as existing and valid, withoutfurther discussion. Under the additional uncertainties imposed by analyzing thesocial effects of nuclear attack, however, it is useful to say just how inferencescan be drawn from effects at the level of individual human actors to effects at thelevel of c lex institutional and social structu• al processes. Because the ambiguitiesin projecting possible attack effects seem to reinforce basic problems ofnominalism in the social sciences, some writers in this volume are explicitly concernedwith stating the kinds of rules, procedures, models, and metaphors whichseem best suited to making existing social evidence tractable to the task of study-1ing nuclear attack. In doing so, they are also writing about the necessary conditionsfor constructing concepts, generalizations, models, and theories in thesocial sciences.is in Chapter I,The Opening Arguments: The Analytic Task as Portrayed in Chapter I."Social Vulnerability and Recovery as Analytic Problems", that thespecial problems of making inferences about the social effects of attack receiveItIFor a definition of a "nominalistic position" toward inquiry undertaken inthis volume, see Neil Sanelser's statement below, p. 596: "In order to pose ascientific question the investigator must operate within a conceptual framework bywhich the major dependent variables are to be described, classified, and analyzed.Without such a framework he cannot identify ranges of empirical variation that arescientifically problematical. With respect to this characterization of dependentvariables I hold an explicitly nominalistic position: that the dependent variablesare not in any natural way 'given' in social reality, but are the product of a selectiveidentification of aspects of the empirical world of social phenomena by theinvestigator for purposes of scientific analysis"'Vil