Abstract
This chapter forms part of a programme aimed at developing a novel cognitive sociological approach concerned with the cognitive processes on which the construction and structuring of society depend and which pervade the latter’s every fibre. Here the starting point for the discussion is Fairclough’s treatment of critical social analysis as a form of dialectical reasoning. While broadly accepting his proposal despite a number of specific disagreements, this chapter fills in a largely blank space in his argument by focusing on the internal workings of dialectical reasoning. Rather than focusing on the practical dialectical nature of critical social analysis alone, it elaborates on the pre-supposed yet undeveloped epistemological dialectics of such analysis. The point is that an adequate grasp of practical dialectics requires the simultaneous consideration of the principal operative features of epistemological dialectics, not just in critical social analysis but more basically still also in social life itself. The proposal in this chapter is that this could be done by introducing the inferential stance in order to consider what I call the dialectics of inference or inferential dialectics. This argument is informed by the conviction that advancement beyond extant sociology demands the incorporation of the cognitive dimension—and inferential dialectics is one way in which this can be done.
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Notes
- 1.
In ‘Dialectics of Discourse’, Fairclough (2012) considers dialectics from a historical point of view which leads him to consider social change with the focus on those processes—for example, ‘enactment’ and ‘inculcation’—through which new discourses become embedded and operationalized in economies and societies.
- 2.
It should be noted that while Habermas (1992: 109–111) criticizes Peirce for tending towards an overextension of his doctrine of synthetic inferences by basing it on natural evolution and concomitantly neglecting the objectivity of contradiction and difference in linguistic communication, it should be pointed out that the sign-mediation through which inference unfurls cannot be exclusively confined to the latter either. See also footnote 8 below.
- 3.
More recently, Brandom (e.g. 1999) sought to read also Hegel as an inferentialist, but what he does not do is taking Hegelian dialectics seriously. A series of his lectures on Hegel is available on YouTube.
- 4.
This represents a considerable improvement on Fairclough, Jessop, and Sayer (2004: 5) who referred to Habermas’ triad as ‘truth, truthfulness and appropriateness’, thereby exhibiting the symptomatic normative poverty threatening critical realism: Habermas’ (1984: 39) normatively crucial ‘rightness’ is absent and the aesthetic or conative component is mistakenly duplicated.
- 5.
Noteworthy is Fairclough, Jessop, and Sayer’s (2004: 4) encounter with the cognitive problematic: as fleetingly as they recognize the relevance of the cognitive dimension, as abruptly they turn their back on it.
- 6.
In ‘The Dialectics of Discourse’, Fairclough (2012: 4) speaks of ‘imaginaries … projections of possible states of affairs, “possible worlds”’, but this still begs the question of the source on which such imaginaries feed, namely the cognitive order of society.
- 7.
Here I draw on Strydom (2011: 143–151), in which a fairly detailed treatment of inference and its implications in Critical Theory is offered against the background of the Left-Hegelian tradition shared by Critical Theory and pragmatism since Marx and Peirce.
- 8.
Fairclough regards semiosis as an important if subordinate part of his critical approach, but what is remarkable is that it is not treated at its proper level, as I am assuming here. Since semiosis is confined to the symbolic as distinct from the material dimension of social life, as in Fairclough, Jessop, and Sayer (2004), the semiotic medium allowing mediation through three-dimensional signs which implicates the material dimension as well is lost sight of. Ultimately, this occludes the possibility of appreciating the place and role of humans in both sociocultural and natural evolution, on which see, for example, Strydom (2015c, 2016).
- 9.
Apel’s (1981) seminal Peirce studies of the 1960s played a crucial role in bringing the neglected founder of pragmatism and his semiotic thought to attention in Europe and beyond.
- 10.
Of the traditional emphasis on only two rather than three modes of inference, Adorno (1976: 76) has the following to say: ‘The conceptual dichotomy of induction and deduction is the scientistic substitute for dialectics.’
- 11.
In an earlier work, Jackendoff (1999: 74) proposes to conceive of these conceptual foundations as the universal skeleton of human culture. The linguistic or conceptual dimension is most obvious, but there are of course also other rule systems involved—for example, logic, mathematics and informational redundancy.
- 12.
For a more comprehensive presentation of the cognitive order, see for example, Strydom (2015a), especially Table 1, p. 278.
- 13.
Badiou (2013a [1982]: 6–9) stresses what may be called placement indexing, but analytically considered it pre-supposes what may be called conceptual indexing, which classifies places in the first instance.
- 14.
- 15.
Badiou (2013a [1982]: 18–21) is fascinated by this particular dimension of dialectics and takes pains in his critical treatment of Hegel’s Science of Logic to extract and bring it to the fore. In his esoteric vocabulary, this latent phenomenon which is ontologically of the world yet according to the logic of appearance is not in the world is referred to as the ‘inexistent’ (2013b [2006]: 321–324). The sociological concept of ‘latency’ is relevant here, on which see for example Luhmann (1995: 294, 334–340). In Critical Theory, Honneth (2003: 238–245) stresses the importance of a latent surplus or potential in society that re-emerges time and again to press towards its realization, which is captured by the Left-Hegelian concept of ‘inner-social transcendence’.
- 16.
Besides a transcendental argument drawing on Kant and Hegel and such followers of theirs as Peirce, Apel and Habermas, the idea of the cognitive order and its principles could be justified in an number of different modes, including: linguistic drawing on, for example, Jackendoff (1999, 2007); formal logico-mathematical drawing on, for example, Peirce (1992, 1998) and Piaget (1983); and information-theoretical focusing on redundancy drawing on, for example, Van Peursen, Bertels and Nauta (1968) and Luhmann (1998).
- 17.
Badiou (2013a [1982]: 9–11), once again, elaborates on this, the Hegelian concept of Rückfälle.
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Acknowledgement
I wish to thank Norman Fairclough for graciously having provided me with a copy of his 2014 ISSA paper as well as with relevant contextual information.
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Strydom, P. (2018). Inferential Dialectics: On Dialectical Reasoning in Critical Social Science and the Socio-Cultural World. In: Giri, A. (eds) Beyond Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6641-2_5
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