Picking out Strands: more on –emic/etic
In earlier issues I have talked about the –emic/etic dichotomy, and scientific socialism. This appeared in my ‘maroon socialism’ diagram, which I have annotated variously:
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From Issue 20, on Purpose of Life...
“There is no purpose of life...and all people are equal in pursuing it”
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From Issue 22, on Language...
“emic and etic – Language, Philosophy and Society”
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Socialism is a relationship between society (inner) and the environment (outer). There are several steps, firstly creating a semi-tamed environment, and then a ‘tamed environment’. Note that the maroon is associated with culture, and pink with skills, technology and not least scientific socialism. The –emic is associated with social conventions as to what equals what, and in technology we must be ready to challenge this. Now picking out strands is an essential feature of scientific socialism, and very relevant to this is hypercorrection, introduced in the Issue 20 for situations where strands are insufficiently unravelled. This is clearly understood by phonologists in language study – for example popping in H’s such as ‘helsewhere’ - but I also believe we can talk of ‘ethical hypercorrection’ in ethics. And in picking out strands, the methodology does not differ significantly from market research, though this is notably a micro-analysis.
Picking out strands is important for identifying relevant social factors: some people may see the institution of marriage as one of a number of social evils, as did Robert Owen in the earlier part of the 19th Century. But if one looks at the arguments, surely the problem is that wives had restricted property rights. So is the issue one of marriage as a whole, or the emancipation of women as a whole?
The concept of ethical hypercorrection came to me in the ’Seventies when I felt there were flaws in some feminists arguments: I have discussed this in Issue 26 on Gender (‘Sexism: ) primarily in connection with gender rôles, picking out two strands, rôles within the household and those outside, and considered the combination of rôles, leaving aside questions of innate propensity to motherhood, or indeed any other aptitude; combination of rôles was sufficient to my point. But ethical hypercorrection is a challenge for all progressive movements: people sense some flaw they can’t finger on, and are tempted to see progressive ideas as refuted. Thus we should not be tempted to pursue some path such as ‘post-feminism’ and perhaps ‘post-modernism’.
In the diagram below I put forward the model in which the ethical hypercorrection appears. The diagram comes from an article under preparation which has been shelved for some while (and indeed the first part related to dialectical materialism, which I didn’t really get to grips with):
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-etic, -emic and hypercorrection
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I shall outline this diagram by focussing on the two appearances of ‘association’: the first example appears between ‘concept’ and ‘realisation’. We acquire a concept by associating it with its range of realisations and deciding they are the same sort of thing. Thus in a language we learn a colour, which is realised in various shades. The second example of an association relates something created with its perception: babies learn to associate what they hear with how it is articulated, and sound-waves transmit what is spoken to the hearer.
In each case association can take various forms, such as hearing, teaching and evolving. Thus some forms of association are passive and others are active. To my mind my mind culture relates to passive association and technology to active association.
Now an important tool for picking out strands, not least for scientific socialism, is the discipline of statistics, and below is a scheme for analysis:
level
(in some instances known as ‘moments’)
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description
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Example
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1st
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averages, e.g. mean
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social and economic aggregates and trends
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2nd
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variability, e.g. variance or ‘standard deviation’
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random appearance of momentous individuals with varying effect
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3rd
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skewness
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e.g. income effects
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4th
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{multi-normality},
kurtosis or ‘bulgingness’,
‘stragglingness’
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hetero/homogeneity of communities, degree to which results are distorted by exceptions
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Let us look at the interaction of trends and random effects, and here I would like to consider the rise of Hitler: Hitler led the Nazi movement in the ’Twenties and ’Thirties before finally coming to power. But the thing that gave the movement the real momentum was the economic conditions after the Wall Street crash. However by early 1933, the Nazis appeared to have passed their peak, and might well have declined further, but President Hindenburg felt that it would be helpful if Hitler were allowed to lead the German working classes rather than the socialists and communists, and appointed him Chancellor - with a cabinet with only one other Nazi – thinking in this way the left could be controlled. So here we had the combination of a social trend with a random effect.
So we have something akin to which came first the chicken or the egg: perhaps, since the chicken lays more than egg, the social trend is the chicken, and the random effect the egg.
But now let us look at the requirements for identifying key elements, which I might call a ‘dialectic scheme’ – perhaps as a token gesture to the much misunderstood dialectical materialism:
(i) To identify at least three strands in a society, there must be at least three observations, likewise for any number.
(ii) Over and above these strands there will be random effects, sometimes known as ‘catastrophes’, whose effects will be cumulative and which will require additional observations to those required to identify the various strands in society.
(iii) In a set of ethical values, there must be at least one axiom for each type of relationship.
(iv) In any set of policies, there must be as many tools as there are objectives.
The idea of picking out strands has a mathematical parallel: if our ideas are expressed mathematically, strands correspond to variables and observations to simultaneous equations.
I italicised the above phrase ‘whose effects will be cumulative’, since one must beware of mixing preferred hypotheses with method, which seemed to me a fault in the approaches of both Marxists and anti-Marxists in my limited understanding of dialectical materialism. But in fact for statisticians at least, it is a much stronger assumption – though often made – that random effects are not cumulative and in fact independent. Furthermore cumulative random effects are likely to seriously obscure the underlying trends, social and indeed otherwise.
I have in fact extended this dialectic scheme, and let us turn to item (iv), the idea that in any set of policies, especially economic, there must be as many tools as there are objectives. This point, which has a mathematical basis, came to me from New Zealand economist the Wolfgang Rosenberg, who was active in New Zealand opposing the neo-liberal policies of the Labour Finance minister Roger Douglas in the ‘Eighties. In addition, to look at item (iii), I have already introduced the idea in my introduction that in a set of ethical values, there must be at least one axiom for each type of relationship. In formal logic we need axioms for one proposition, for two propositions and for three propositions, though we do not need any for four or more since a combination of the above will suffice.
By Martin Prior
