What does it mean to listen to an individual's story? How can we come to understand something we call "society" through one person's story?
First of all, in sociology there is a method that analyzes the larger structures and history through large-scale quantitative surveys. In this method, the samples that become the object of study must be "representative," with deviations removed as much as possible. Otherwise, no inferences about the population could be made. But what we have in our hands is not the representative or typical case of society — it is the story of an "individual we happen to encounter," each one with their own personality, varied and complex.
From this, a different method emerged — one that, unlike quantitative surveys, gave up trying to understand the whole of society and instead focused only on the story of some individual. But this newly emerged method has its own problems. It forbids us from stepping outside the individual's story to consider the larger social structures or history. It almost demands that we treat the life history of an individual
as something equivalent to a "novel" and ask us only to "appreciate" it. From the time I was young, I felt unbearably dissatisfied with the fact that sociology had only these two methods.
Especially when conducting interview research in Okinawa, you keenly feel that story and history are "the same thing." In sociology up to that point, this — "perceiving story and history at the same time" — was impossible. From here began my own search for a way to think about the whole of society from the story of an individual.
If we treat individual life histories merely as material for analyzing society and history, we cannot grasp their richness and interest, nor the pain and pathos of a life. But if we detach a life history from social and historical reality and treat it merely as an "interesting story" like a novel, then we end up unable to understand the social and historical structures that produced that very story behind it.
In particular, the latter — the way of thinking that detaches an individual's story from social and historical reality — is in fact a method most often used in research on "minorities." People placed in weak positions in society are also people who do not get fully captured by large-scale quantitative surveys. Therefore, when we try to research them, in most cases we have no choice but to approach them through qualitative material that is not representative. But here the pendulum starts to swing in the opposite direction. That is, in order to come close to minorities, we end up not seeing their facticity and historicity, and instead simply tasting their stories as if they were literature.
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But the narrator never once described those classmates as "pitiful." In other interview settings as well, she never used a similar expression even once.
The cocoa episode is a story about the cruelty of living as a woman that surfaces at the end of girls acting on what they thought and bravely changing reality. It is also a story about the unmanageable suffering of being a woman in a particular community.
This story connects to the question of how much we ourselves must accept the consequences of acting on what we thought. And the cocoa story shows that beings called the weak, the minority, or the "other" are sometimes placed in situations where they are forced to bear responsibilities they would not normally have to carry.
The girls are neither pitiful victims nor free, brave fighters of resistance. The bitterness of reality lies somewhere between the two. And this suffering is, in many cases, not expressed as suffering. Painful experiences and their expression are experienced and expressed within the practical context of daily life. The suffering of one middle school girl who, on a night when something happened, came to her friend's house in search of warm bath water and cocoa — this suffering we cannot directly understand and share. Even so, the fact that such a thing actually happened. The fact that the narrator provided the bath water and cocoa without asking anything. The fact that, even now, more than 25 years later, she still remembers it and told me, the listener. And the fact that I, in turn, am now becoming the writer who records this story to convey something
to you, the reader who is reading this right now. I think that what "to understand" means is something that includes all of these.
The cigarette story tells us that no matter how harsh the situation, people find pleasure and amusement. The cocoa story tells us that even within a free and self-directed life, the suffering of "being a young woman" exists, and that the occasions on which it is put into words by the person herself are extremely limited.
By listening to a story, we can gain knowledge about a particular act or situation — about what it actually was like. It can be complex, rich, and contrary to expectations. On the other hand, we know how cruel and merciless the history and structures that pull us in can be. If a contradiction arises between these two, what should we do? Even then, we don't need to cut individual stories off from the world, nor do we need to belittle the harshness of history and structures. Because, by changing the "theory of human beings" — the mediating term that links these two — we can interpret the harshness of macro-level history and structures together with the creativity and agency of micro-level individual action, without contradiction.
If qualitative sociology has any meaning, it lies precisely here. Our lives are a continuous succession of unrepeatable, one-time-only acts and choices made within unrepeatable, one-time-only situations. If there is any meaning in continuing to observe and record such situations and actions, it would be because all of those situations and actions enrich, in some form or another, our "theory of human beings."
What is a "theory of human beings"? It is a collection of "understandings" that say, in such a situation, taking such an action is not unreasonable, and "understandings" that make us reconsider how much responsibility a person bears for the action they took in that situation. This theory does not reduce the many hypotheses that run rampant and contradict one another. Rather, it tries to multiply the hypotheses even further. That is, instead of choosing one of the mutually contradictory hypotheses and discarding all the others, it tries — as if drawing a map at full life-size — to multiply the contradictory hypotheses as much as possible. What this theory yields is the "understanding" that even within harsh circumstances people can live with joy, and that even if such a life is possible, there is absolutely no need to minimize the harshness of those circumstances.
Just because someone is acting in a self-directed and intentional way does not mean they must bear the entire responsibility for that situation. We can stop putting agency and responsibility for action in a one-to-one relationship, and we can socially deliberate over the "meaning" carried by a situation, or by history and structures. Within such deliberation, responsibility may arise, and in some cases it may be reduced. In other words, I am trying to make the theory of human beings as complex as possible.
Fundamentally, this world has no meaning. There is no meaning in the fact that we get caught up in some war, that we are born into a family of a particular class, or that we are "male" or "female" — none of it. We were suddenly thrown into an infinite chain of cause and effect that connects to an absolute outside, and we have to live there.
And we use the resources we received in our hands within this chain of cause and effect — somehow, by any means — and we live desperately. Meaning lies precisely in this very fact of "trying to live desperately." We cannot understand why we exist. But we can understand each other in how we, within this incomprehensible world, desperately live each day.
We are trying to create a theory of human beings. There is no end to this work. This work continues infinitely. If there is anything sociologists can do, it is to endlessly repeat the report of cases in which actors, placed in those situations within a history and structure that are each given only once, chose this particular action.
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Whether large or small, as long as a survey deals with human beings, every survey is conducted in the same way — surrounded by society, with no other choice.
Until "voices" become "data." In between is buried this enormous interpretation and mutual interaction. This is surely not just my own personal experience. Even in large-scale surveys where most of the work is "outsourced," only the question of whether the researcher sees it with their own eyes differs — the same elements are also embedded in that process.
The numbers we end up handling, too, were originally read by someone, who then answered, choosing on the spot which of the response options fit best.
In other words, the qualitative process of interpretation and reinterpretation is the very foundation of quantitative research.
And what is most important is that, through these very elements, both qualitative and quantitative research can arrive at validity. It is not that on one side there is objective material and on the other subjective material; if all material is created on the spot through interaction and subjective judgment, then since we have no other method, we have no choice but to work with that. We actually do exactly that. Moreover, it must be said that we somehow manage to make it work. So to speak, even if it cannot become entirely valid, it can become roughly valid. If, granting that a black box exists in any survey method, we ask only about the objectivity of the survey results in each instance, no problem arises, and we can avoid the situation of any single survey method being treated as wholly suspect. And research grounded in such rough validity, even if there are mistakes in individual analyses, will somehow still be connected, on the whole, to the outside world. There are also many cases of error in such social research, but there is no other approach than to treat it as roughly valid.
Of course, for it to become "more" valid, there are criteria to be met, such as transparency of materials and processes and discussion within the community of scientists. It is impossible here to examine each of these principles. But can we not at least say this — that, whether quantitative or qualitative, the open discussion within the community of sociologists (and the wider world surrounding it) itself needs to be carried out under this principle of "rough validity"?
According to Merton, the ethos of these scientists, their mores, or "habitus," and the interactions and interpretations grounded in them, are precisely what guarantees objective validity. Of course, this is not an "automatic" process, but I think we must repeatedly remind ourselves that we cannot rely on anything else. And it is not only scientists who possess such an ethos or habitus. What matters is that discussion in which many people participate, in an open arena, is guaranteed as much as possible.
In any case, the existence of a black box inside quantitative research is no reason for us to become pessimistic. It does not mean "quantitative research is as arbitrary as qualitative research"; on the contrary, it merely means "quantitative research is as valid as qualitative research."
Up to now, we have thought about the "sociological" process of mutual interaction and interpretation as something cut off from what is called "facts." But going forward, we must seriously think about how, through mutual interaction and meaningful interpretation, we can reach "facts" or "the world."
We entrust facticity and validity, so to speak, to society. We, together with other people, fabricate validity and facticity on the spot.
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Donald Davidson's critique of conceptual relativism and the principle of charity
In his paper "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme," Davidson criticizes the concept of "conceptual scheme" and the "conceptual relativism" based on it. But rather than simply criticizing conceptual relativism itself, he criticizes the "dichotomy of form and content" that constitutes it. According to Davidson, this dichotomy is a third dogma, following the distinction between analytic and synthetic and reductionism — "the two dogmas" criticized by Quine.
Davidson's argument is roughly composed as follows. He first explains what a conceptual scheme is, and says that, substantively, in a certain sense, it is "language" itself. Therefore, it is possible to understand conceptual relativism as a problem about a different language and another language — that is, the problem of untranslatable languages. Regarding this "failure of translation," Davidson divides it into two: total failure and partial failure. On the question of total failure of translation, he explains, with reference to Tarski's Convention T, that if there is some "activity" and we know that it is a language, then there is no such thing as something totally untranslatable. Next, regarding partial failure of translation — that is, partial misunderstanding with a conversational partner with whom translation is possible — he points out that we just need to revise and correct our interpretation on the spot. This reinterpretation is grounded in the premise that the conversational partner is, on the whole, saying something correct. Davidson calls that premise the "principle of charity." And he says that conceptual relativism, and the "third dogma of empiricism" that lies behind it — the concept of separating that which organizes from that which is organized — cannot easily be justified.
Davidson first defines "conceptual scheme" and "conceptual relativism" as follows.
"A conceptual scheme is a way of organizing experience; it is a system of categories that gives form to sense data, and at the same time a viewpoint by which an individual, a culture, or a period explores the landscape before it. There may be no translation from one scheme to another. In that case, the beliefs, desires, hopes, and bits of knowledge that characterize one person have nothing genuinely corresponding to them for a person of another scheme. Then, what is real is relative to a scheme, and what looks like reality in one system may not be so in another" [Davidson 1991:192].
Indeed, we often want to talk about the very framework or language that organizes experience and constructs reality. But such frameworks cannot be compared with each other, and to understand them in their original form is also impossible.
In sociology there are many theories that presuppose a gap between reality and language, and these theories are connected to a "sense of otherness." The world we sociologists live in is fragmented, scattered apart without understanding one another. The world is divided into small groups with different values, attitudes, emotions, and experiences. They are not on equal terms; they are differentiated between a small group that holds strong power, authority, or economic strength, and a majority that has nothing else. And within this, again, they are finely subdivided by gender, hometown, cultural background, and skin color. Our world is a world divided in complex ways by tangled boundary lines. This world is full of "others" and is also a world of "irrationality." From an irreconcilable other viewpoint, what counts as rationality from one viewpoint often becomes irrationality. From the time of Weber, we seem to have come quite a long way.
Therefore, sociologists tend to receive the world as something divided, and to build theories that presuppose this. We are far more accustomed to "others" than to "human beings," to "irrationality" than to "rationality," to "power" than to "understanding." In the eyes of such sociologists, Davidson's critique of conceptual relativism and his principle of charity will probably look dangerously affirmative. They seem to wash away real differences, power, conflict, and resistance, and to lead us along a happy path of understanding the other.
But this kind of untranslatability is one metaphor, and at that, a misunderstood metaphor [Davidson 2010:207].
There is the view that all languages distort reality. This is to say that, even if the mind can grasp things as they are, it can do so only when language is absent. According to this way of thinking, language is an inert object (which necessarily distorts), an object independent of the workings of the human beings who use it. But I find it hard to support this view of language [Davidson 1991:194].
If the mind can grasp reality without distortion, then the mind itself must be in a state lacking categories or concepts. This characterless self is close to several theories that are wholly outside the world of philosophy. For example, there are theories that hold there is freedom in a decision detached from all of the subject's desires, habits, and dispositions. Or there are theories that hold the mind itself can perceive and see all of its ideas. All of these theories regard the mind as detached from the various properties that make it up. This is a necessary conclusion in some types of argument, but we have no choice but to reject this conclusion and its premise [same book, 194-195].
The thinking that separates language from reality and from experience presupposes a "characterless self," a "mind detached from various properties," or an unconstructed self and society — and Davidson denies the existence of anything pre-linguistic of this sort.
In any case, take the problem of conceptual relativism: in the process by which two people are active in language, when they cannot translate each other, the problem becomes whether such a language is even possible to begin with, or whether it is a language at all. Davidson splits cases of failure to translate two languages into "total failure of translation" and "partial failure of translation," and proceeds with the argument.
First, Davidson holds that if there is total failure to translate some language, he denies that it is a language at all.
There cannot be a form of activity that we cannot interpret in our language and at the same time becomes verbal behavior. If this is right, we should think of it this way: that is, a form of activity that cannot be interpreted in our language, by means of language, is not verbal behavior [195].
Davidson regards the working of a conceptual scheme as something that organizes experiences such as the universe, the world, the reality of nature, sensory stimulation and the data we obtain from sensation, or the "environment" [203-204]. In particular, when there exists a scheme that "fits" experience or reality, Davidson goes so far as to describe that scheme as "true." In the end, the problem of conceptual relativism can be rephrased as the question "can there be a language that is true and yet untranslatable?"
For a theory to fit the totality of sensory evidence is the same as for that theory to be true. If a theory is quantified over physical objects, numbers, or sets, and if that theory fits the totality of sensory evidence, then what is said about such entities is true [206].
Then, the attempt to characterize a language or conceptual scheme by the thinking that it fits with some entity ends up arriving at the simple idea that what is true is what is acceptable as a conceptual scheme or theory. To accept differences of detail in views among people who share one scheme, it is best to say that they are mostly true. So conceptual schemes that are different from our own become things that are mostly true and yet untranslatable. Whether this is a useful criterion is the same question as how much we can understand the concept of truth as applied to language if we make it independent of the concept of translatability. My answer is this: a concept of truth independent of the concept of translatability cannot be understood at all [207].
March 12, 2023
