An Analytics of Marginality

Abstract

How does something come to be considered ‘marginal’ or ‘central’? More specifically, on what grounds do particular approaches to understanding in the human and natural sciences become marginal or central? The answer to this question depends, in particular, on two different orders of analysis: a metaphysics of inquiry and an empirics of inquiry. Taken together these analyses enable us to understand why marginalities are inevitable concomitants of disciplined inquiry and how, despite their inevitability, the particular form that marginalities take in a given domain of disciplined inquiry always, and again inevitably, reflects empirical contingencies.

Notes

1. My analysis is thus not exactly an “analytics” in the broadly Foucauldian sense, which Mitchell Dean, for example, characterizes in Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage, 1999), 21–22. For while, especially in relation to the empirical aspect, it does consider “the specific conditions under which [marginalities] emerge, exist and change,” it also, in opposition to a true analytics, “treat[s] them [the marginalities] as [at least partially] manifestations of a fundamental contradiction.” (That is the metaphysics.)

2. See, for example, my article, “Kuhn's Risk-Spreading Argument and the Organization of Scientific Communities,” Episteme 1 (2005): 201–9.

3. So denominated in Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 89.

4. Stuart Hampshire, Morality and Conflict (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 106.

5. This is a matter about which Mikhail Bakhtin had some particularly acute things to say. See, for example, the exposition of his notion of dialogue provided by Gary Morson and Caryl Emerson in Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 143.

6. See, for example, Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 83, where he rejects the idea, as he puts it, that an object of inquiry might exhibit “an intentional stubbornness, an insistence on being described in a certain way, its own way.”

7. It is important not to over-theorise these observations. I appreciate that the interpretability of texts, indeed of phenomena more generally, is contested territory. I do not mean, by using this example, to point towards any particular literary-theoretical position, but merely to observe that, as a reader, I have found that the texts that I approach, and the secondary materials I use as aids to approaching them, seem to exhibit two striking features, related to my main points in this section—namely (a) they can be read in many ways, and (b) many of these readings are illuminating, even when they are different from one another.

8. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 15, 17.

9. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 185.

10. For a more detailed analysis, emphasizing the work of Isaiah Berlin, John Gray, and others, see my “Pluralism and Liberalism,” in Handbook of Political Theory, ed. Gerald Gaus and Chandran Kukathas (London: Sage, 2004).

11. See Thomas Kuhn, The Essential Tension (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 324.

12. See, for example, Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

13. Richard Rorty, “From Epistemology to Hermeneutics,” Acta Philosophica Fennica 30 (1978): 11–30.

14. See, for example, Jerry Suls and Ladd Wheeler, eds., Handbook of Social Comparison (New York: Kluwer/Plenum, 2000).

15. On this matter, see Pierre Bourdieu, “The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason” [1975], in The Science Studies Reader, ed. Mario Biagiolo (London: Routledge, 1998), 39, where he considers the conditions under which “the pursuit of private scientific interests … continuously operates to the advantage of the progress of science.”

16. See, for example, Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook for Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. Mario Biagiolo (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986).

17. See Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998).

18. That there are many potentially countervailing pressures, indeed that these potentially countervailing pressures are themselves institutionally supported in well-functioning communities of inquiry, is the main point of my book Naturalizing Epistemology: Thomas Kuhn and the ‘Essential Tension’ (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Notwithstanding these countervailing pressures, the scenario I’ve sketched is nevertheless a common one. More to the point, even the countervailing pressures do not ensure that marginalization of perhaps even highly meritorious alternative positions does not occur. Indeed, nothing merely human could ensure that.

19. Xueguang Zhou, “Organization Decision Making as Rule Following,” in Organizational Decision Making, ed. Zur Shapira (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 262.

20. See, crucially, W. Brian Arthur, Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994).

21. See, for example, my Naturalizing Epistemology, chap. 6.

22. Brian J. Loasby, Choice, Complexity and Ignorance: An Enquiry into Economic Theory and the Practice of Decision-Making (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 140.