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When I crossed the frontier I thought:
More than my house I need the truth
But I need my house too. And since then
Truth for me has been like a house and a car
And they took them
Bertold BrechtI am grateful to The Raven for giving me this opportunity to comment on some aspects of the current state of sociology in Britain. For one thing, sociologists always jump at a chance to explain themselves and their discipline. My main concern, however, is with the curious situation which has developed over the last decade or so. These have been the years of the 'conviction politician', advocating and implementing so-called 'free market' or neo-liberal doctrines which I and most of my colleagues in the sociology profession view as fundamentally unsound. Most of us, too, believe that the application of these doctrines to the problems of contemporary Britain has been extremely misguided and we find ourselves contesting many of the empirical claims made by those in charge. The politicians, in the turn, curl the lip derisively whenever a television interviewer mentions the very word 'sociology' to them. For them, sociologists epitomise, along with education specialists, the 'loony left punditry' which they love to deride, claiming, as Norman Tebbit once put it that 'the chap in the pub with common sense' knows better.
The Problem of Sociology
The purpose of a special issue like this is to be as informative a possible and so, with apologies to those who already know or think they know, I shall begin by explaining what sociology is about. It is often vaguely identified as the study or science of 'society' - a fairly useless definition. Margaret Thatcher would, I imagine, be surprised to hear that as a sociologist myself, I have absolutely no quarrel with her famous assertion that "There is no such thing as society. . . "1 That everyday word 'society' partly describes, partly obscures a set of very familiar experiences we all have and which become more and more puzzling the more we think about them.
The type of experiences I have in mind include the ones we often refer to as being under 'social pressure'. Very diverse examples can be given. We come under social pressure the minute we are born even beforehand. Social pressure makes us toilet trained, speak, say English rather than French, answer to a particular name, think of ourselves as male or female, adopt agnosticism, Anglicanism, Islam.. . and so on. Not all the pressures are immediately obvious ones like parents, families, friends, etc. Some of the most important influences in any upbringing come in fact from dead people. Not just the ones who write books but the ones who through countless actions built on a particular way of life: created, say, the Great British Breakfast and 'good manners', or fought for the vote, free education and health provision.
We are often tempted to think of society as a 'thing' because, of course, it so often does seem to have a life of its own. For example I was brought up fearing the pantheon of gods called 'Times'. My parents married during the Depression. I grew up during the Second World War and after. Would 'Times' be good now the war was over or would they be bad again? 'Times' resembled the weather. Politiccians forecasted them rather badly but they couldn't be controlled On the whole, though, 'Times' did get better while I was young and we had optimism and the Welfare State. Recently 'Times' have been behaving very oddly. A set of regimes which seemed immovable collapsed. Nearer at home the 'welfare consensus' I grew up with collapsed too and people began to talk about Bad Times again Without the certainties and optimism of my youth I feel change inside my head. This feeling, however, must be ten times worse for this years graduates who have studied hard in the expectation of a good job and every vacancy heavily oversubscribed. Obviously there is no such thing as society, but there is also no such thing as the self contained person either - a point Margaret Thatcher was less ready to admit.
Sociology, then, has the extremely difficult task of identifying and explaining 'the forces exerted by people over each other and over themselves' (Elias, 1970), how these forces grow out of individual actions but at the same time constitute the conditions by which individual actions are shaped. Apart from 'society' there isn't a single word to describe all that, though personally, I am very happy to use the term coined by Emil Durkheim, arguably the founder of sociology and an academic discipline, who spoke of the 'collective consciousness' 2. That makes our work an extension of social psychology here, instead of being concerned with the individual mind, with basic processes of memory, cognition and learning, and so on, we are on a different level of analysis, studying the myriad ways and forms through which minds affect each other. However, I'm afraid many of my colleagues will already begin to feel they want to get off my bus. Part of the difficulty of introducing a discipline convincingly is that it does not offer a unified cumulative body of theory and research like some others do. Rather like psychology, it is still divided into a number of research traditions or schools of thought'. 'Collective consciousness' is a term some sociologists don't like at all. Indeed, to join the discipline is like trying to join in a rowdy argument already in progress. One can describe fairly precisely what the argument is about but the chances of hearing one voice at a time or predicting how it will be resolved are fairly slim. Indeed the noise seems to be getting worse because the older editions have split or cross bred with others. New ones are still being invented. This gives plenty of opportunities to charlatans and also to various critics and enemies who want to make the whole thing look like a waste of time. Below, I want to warn about these voices. sociology isn't a waste of time and we should ask why its critics, especially in politics, are so anxious to do it down.
The main internal argument in sociology, sometimes referred to as the Structure/Action debate, takes for granted that the relative orderliness of society arises unplanned out of the countless actions of individuals but that also the relationship is at the same time a two way one: no person is an island. Given that so-called human 'nature'2 is not the same everywhere, a point which many non-sociologists find hard to take, the problem is to explain how the two processes fall together. There is a bewildering variety of answers, but in practice the disunity is a stimulus rather than an obstacle if one spends ones time researching substantive issues - education, say, or race relations or the family. It would no doubt make my article more readable than it is going to be, in fact, if I spent time describing this work. However there is a very good book by Gordon Marshall recently published which does the job much better than I could. Anyone who wants to know what research sociologists get up to will probably find it a more user-friendly introduction than the average A level text (Marshall 1990). Marshall's point is that sociology has had a much better track record of prediction and analysis over the years than its detractors say
What I think deserves attention here, not merely because it is fundamental but also because it is topical, is the question of the relationship between sociology and what one writer recently has called 'The curse of common sense'. Common sense told us that the earth was flat, that iron ships could not float and that people could not fly (Eatwell Observer, 26 April 1992, p28). It is the fount of unimaginativeness and it is very British to have common sense. Sociology, I am pleased to say, is rarely common sense but in that case what sort of sense (if any) is it? I apologise if, in answering the question, the discussion gets a little abstruse in places. Despite that I am going to be talking about something desperately relevant to us all. We are back to Mr Tebbit and the chap in the pub.
Is sociology 'scientific'?
Anyone unfamiliar with the condition of sociology might have expected sociologists to defend themselves from the Chingford Skinhead by claiming that they practice a rational, even scientific academics. Discipline whose methods and findings, compared with the fumbling of 'common sense', constitute a more dependable form of knowledge, which should be correspondingly respected. After all, we respect astronomers' assertions that the earth goes round the sun and not vice versa, despite what the chap in the medieval tavern thought. But no the claim that sociology should be a science are, in fact, routinely questioned in the discipline itself.
In Britain this internal critique of sociology takes both a philosophical and a political form. The sociological community has, of course, always included a large and diverse group who are sceptical on philosophical grounds about the scientific pretensions of the subject, both here and elsewhere. They tend to share the so called relativist' conviction that objectivity in social research is impossible and that its findings cannot be free of subjective meanings and values they also argue that the accumulation of factual evidence to arbitrate between different subjective perspectives is out of the question. Far from being scientific 'facts', the findings of empirical sociology merely constitute an extra account or 'story', which is no more or no less a form of knowledge than the 'lay' accounts given by the subjects of the enquiry (including, of course, include the chap in the pub). In any case, there are many altemative 'stories' within sociology itself: The failure to accumulate a unified body of theory belies any re- maining scientific pretensions sociology may have.
These claims seem to be borne out by the political critique recently mounted by a few members of the profession who have rocked their colleagues with their sudden enthusiasm for free market politics and types of social theory. As they see it, the indifference or hostility of most sociologists to 'neo-liberalism' is not the result of rational conviction at all but the product of an unexamined left-wing consensus in sociology. Even the best British sociological work manifests a bias against capitalism in general and business in particular (Holton and Tumer, 1989; Marsland, 1987; Saunders, 1989 990). If these writers are to be believed, the attitude of sociologists to politics shapes what they think they 'know', whereas in a social science the reverse should be true: knowledge ought to shape political preferences.
Recently, the political and philosophical attacks have begun to converge, despite their apparent differences in origin. Philosophical relativism in sociology always carried a political message that accepted truth about society emerges out of clashes of interest and struggles for power, rather than from debate and rational conviction. In the late sixties it acquired a certain radical 'chic' as a stick with which to beat the conservatism of the Anglo-American sociological establishment, some members of which had been caught dressing up the old War conclusions as value neutral social science and Cold War activities as value neutral research (see for example the collection of essays edited by Colfax and Roach, 1971). So by the time the New light 'enlightenment' was under way, the weapons by which it attacked sociology were already forged and could be turned against their inventors. In Britain, this moment was symbolised for many of us when Keith Joseph, hitting sociology in a tender spot, demanded that the Social Science Research Council drop the word 'science' from its title. Simultaneously, within the discipline, a new generation of so-called 'post modernist' sociologists began to declare a plague on all houses. Post-modernists claim that the transitoriness and uncertainty of modern life have made it impossible to have any fixed rules about what is rational or what knowledge is. In the words of a recent account, they believe that "The quest for truth is always the establishment of power" (Turner, 1990, p.5) Meanwhile, precisely this maxim was being practised in British political life as the government suppressed, massaged or manufactured official statis- tics on the economy, on education training, unemployment, poverty and so on.
We thus seem to have a disturbing choice. Either British sociology must indeed be corrupt and/or incapable of objective judgement, as the various dissidents inside it imply; or else the convictions and actions of those politicians and academics who disparage the 'ra- tional knowledge' claims of current sociological expertise are them- selves demonstrably irrational and dangerous.
Confessions of a GP sociologist
Despite all this I want to defend the unfashionable idea that sociology should be, indeed substantially is, a rational, objective and empirical activity, to which the term science can legitimately be applied. And I want especially to highlight the consequences of rejecting such a project for the discipline. My theme really does have considerable practical significance for what kind of politics and society we will have in future. The developments within and without sociology which have described suggest to me an alarming, possibly growing undercurrent of unreason, which touches more than the internal troubles of the British sociology profession. Of course, people will quite properly go on arguing about the precise philosophical grounds which sociological method rests. But to throw out the very idea of a scientific sociology is to provide an entry for ignorance and extremism.
In saying this I do not write as a professional philosopher of social theory but as what I sometimes call a 'GP sociologist'. Much of my career has been spent in the front line where sociology meets the lay world: researching empirical matters relating to employment and education; teaching introductory sociology to a heterogeneous bunch of undergraduate and adult students; and as co-author of an introductory textbook that has apparently reached a fairly wide readership (Lee and Newby, 1983) . All of these 'lay' groups - research contact new students, new readers - very reasonably share the same diffi culty. They want to be told exactly why they ought to take sociology seriously.
The days have long since gone when in reply we could simply blind them with philosophy or admit, with proud embarrassment, that sociologists themselves do not take it seriously, ho, ho, ho. As the post-Thatcher generation becomes adult, the doctrines one used merely to read about in the library have become the ground rules and assumptions of everyday life, especially in Essex. In their first sociology seminar more and more new students tell me that life is, struggle for the survival of the fittest and competition is always benign in its effects. Capitalism has brought technical progress and universal affluence so class doesn't exist any more. If people are poor or unemployed it is their own fault. The Welfare State made people lazy and trade unions were responsible for our current economic woes Above all, private enterprise always gives the most efficient service Taxes spent on the Health Service will simply go to immigrants These statements are treated as self-evident 'common sense'. If I think otherwise it is because I am tiresomely left wing not because sociology is or will ever be 'scientific'.
To justify the challenge which sociology offers to a whole range of such taken for granted ideas is a difficult task in part because I myself do not think that current sociological research and teaching is as rigorous or as free from suppressed prejudices of both the right and left, as it might be. However, we do not conclude from the beastly behaviour of certain footballers that football itself is a game without rules. Similarly doing 'sociology' is not necessarily the same as 'what sociologists do'. It is up to my colleagues to defend for themselves each individual piece of work they carry out. My main concern here is to suggest that the general scientific aspirations of sociological method are possible and desirable.
We are, of course, too easily seduced by a particular view of scientific knowledge - the so-called 'positivist' conception - which identifies science with certainty (Keat and Urry, 1982, Ch. l). To possess this certainty, it is said, knowledge must take the form of an agreed body of theory expressed as objective general laws; these laws in turn, must have been established through the detached observation of 'facts'. I am certainly not renewing the case for some new kind of positivism here, for the positivist picture of how science actually works is no longer recognisable even in a discipline like physics though natural science has given rise to the modern technological outlook, in which knowledge is judged by whether it 'works', even if much of that is speculative and uncertain and we are coming to understand the magic uncertainty of a technology that appears to 'work' in the short term at the price of destroying the future fundamental science itself however, is constantly making yesterday's certainties into today's uncertainties and the more we know about ourselves and our relation to nature the more we become aware of what we do not, indeed can never know. As far as the social world is concerned, certainty is what is offered by dogma and blind Faith, not by reason or science. In so far as people accept any of the matter without question, their beliefs may not, in the end, be wrong but they are certainly irrational. Scientific knowledge, then, cannot be equated with certainty.
To associate 'science' with universal 'laws' and incontrovertible its is also extremely misleading as well as limiting, for by no means all of the 'proper' sciences exhibit these features. The controversies medical research over the causes of heart disease, which are more like empirical sociology than experimental physics are a case in point. Yet medical research is generally considered to be scientific. Some sciences too, such as astronomy or geology deal with unique phenomena that have to be studied in terms of their particular history. Indeed, historical studies rather than physics offers a better paradigm for the scientific aspirations of the sociologist. (I am prepared to argue, though historians might shudder, that sociology a branch of history).
Contrary to positivist doctrine, then, I believe that whatever advantages scientific procedures possess actually depend on the stematic use of uncertainty. Once this is recognised, the supposed objections to scientific sociology become arguments in its favour.
Being objective and being certain
Can there really be objectivity in the study of social relationships? As I have myself already argued, society is not an observable object but a psychic complex of subjective interests, viewpoints, perspectives and meanings. From this, relativists infer that scientific detachment is impossible in sociology. After all, sociologists themselves are part of society and have their own beliefs and values which motivate their research and contaminate their findings.
The implications of this need thinking about. If it were strictly the case that the subjective behaviour and experiences of others could not be studied objectively, it would be very difficult to see how even on a mundane level, we could understand each other and co-operate or communicate at all. Everyone would be locked into a private subjective world from which there would be no escape and it would be impossible for me to understand what any one else was doing. Human life would be solitary not essentially social as it in fact is.
In any case one should not talk about 'subjective' meanings without examining the nature of 'subjectivity' a little further. There is actually no such thing as wholly subjective thought and action because we all use concepts and language which we have learned from others. Without them one could not even monitor one's own behaviour, still less 'think'. What is more, the very possibility of having a perspective of one's own which can be described as different from that of others presupposes concepts and meanings which act as common or shared reference point for comparing different outlooks. Thus, as Durkheim observed, a concept is not my concept but collective and impersonal. In that sense a concept is not subjective but objective. In the end, too, it must reflect some of the reality of life round us and with the aid of reason it is often possible to work out some aspects of what that reality is like. Beyond the private ideas of the individual, then "there is a world of absolute ideas according to which he (sic) must shape his own. . ." (Durkheim, 1976, 437).
I think we can go further than that, though. Arguably, the most basic of the concepts we learn from society are the notions of error and falsehood, which is, to quote Durkheim again, "the first intuition of the realm of the truth" (ibid.). Personal and daily life revolves around the possibility of independent truth on one hand and mistakes and lies on the other. I am not of course claiming that in practice we always find it either easy or possible to reach 'the truth'; still less that there is some kind of incontrovertible or 'absolute' truth. On the contrary the pages of philosophical debate about positivism have convinced most people that progress in knowledge consists of eliminating false beliefs rather than in 'proving' particular statements to be immutably certain and true. Proof in that sense is never possible. Truth is not, in fact, an object or a content of a belief at all but an attribute of how we have arrived at it. It makes perfectly good objective sense to distinguish what Brecht, in a memorable phrase called 'telling the truth as we find it', from lies, propaganda, sales talk, what we read in the Sun and so on. The distinction of the false from the true in this sense, is essential for routine dealings with others and for a host of practical decisions. The chap in the pub needs the truth every time he buys a round and is given change. He also expects the 'account' to be consistent and logical and suspects the barman's motives or sanity if it is not. Why should sociology be different? We do not have to suspend everyday notions of truth and logic simply because what we are checking is a page of unemploy ment statistics rather than the bill for some drinks.
If truth and logic are common sense, however, common sense does not always make use of them. When we check a bill it makes sense to be sceptical about its truth and accuracy. But in many important areas of everyday life, including love, politics and religion people do not keep up a sceptical rational attitude to their beliefs Somehow we are very willing to take many things on trust because we think them 'common sense' or want to believe what we are told Disciplined scientific study, however, entails being sceptical all the time, building systematic uncertainty into uncertainty into the knowledge gathering process, whatever is under investigation. Of course, when sociology asks people to put their cherished beliefs about society and their fellow human beings 'on hold' in this way it cannot expect to be popular. But that is not a good reason for saying that sociology cannot be objective in principle.
2.Established facts or objective evidence?
It can also be argued, however, that objectivity requires 'established facts' if we are to arbitrate between alternative beliefs. In sociology we do not have such facts because, unlike the natural world, the social world cannot be directly observed. The raw material of what sociology studies is not social behaviour itself but its description of these descriptions might be peoples' own accounts of 'what is (or was) going on' or they might be official statistics and other adminis trative fact-gatherers' accounts. Failing either of these, sociologists produce their own descriptive raw material through their reports of participant observation, through surveys and so on. But there can never be direct observation of the 'facts' of social behaviour itself because all of these materials are interpretations which impose meaning on what is 'observed'.
The most celebrated discussion of 'social facts' in sociology Durkheim's Rules of Sociological Method which for years has been pilloried as the manifesto of arch-positivism in sociology. However Durkheim specifically rejected the fashionable positivism of his time (1964, xl) and arguably, the procedures he commended, though of ambiguous, were a great deal more subtle and fertile than gener. acknowledged 3. Of course, in so far as Durkheim really was talk about observing social facts he was on dangerous ground. An 'established fact' is as impossible as an 'incontrovertible truth'. No science works with facts but with information and evidence of varying quality, which is quite a different matter. Even in natural science you cannot just 'observe the facts': the content of information is relative to the observer's situation and is the product of interpretation. Descartes famous illustration of this is still one of the best: at certain times of the year the sun looks as if it is bigger than at other times. Even Durkheim himself wrote that "observation is suspect until it is confirmed by reason" (Durkheim, quoted in Gane, 1988, p.l33-4
Admittedly, Durkheim's position is full of tensions which still beset us and we should not seek to minimise the difficulties which the scientific interpretation of social facts faces. However, once again, the situation is one with which everyone is already familiar. Description rather than facts are the raw material on which a great deal of everyday decision taking is successfully based. We are all quite used to the idea that accounts are 'subjectively valid' in the sense that they have a meaning that is valid to the author of the description - as, for example when the barman, perhaps in all sincerity swears I gave him a fiver, not a tenner; when a man tells his wife he loves her; or when government politicians talk of economic recovery. We do not, however, immediately conclude that all such descriptions are equally complete, still less correct. Correct description implies a rational relationship between the description itself and the evidence (not fact) given by independent experience. Someone can describe to the manager how they saw me give the barman a tenner; the wife can find a letter from the husband's mistress; we can check the politician's use of statistics or find out too late that the party we voted for was wrong about an economic recovery after all.(3)
It is worth reminding ourselves too, that many descriptions that are perfectly valid from the subjective viewpoint of the individual can also be described as incorrect from the subjective viewpoint of the individual. The barman's belief that it is easy to cheat customers may soon result in his getting the sack. The erroneous belief that an economic recovery is under way may nonetheless reinforce political support for economic policies that are guaranteed to ensure that recovery cannot happen. Beliefs that a charismatic leader offers the solution to a nation's problems can lead to the very opposite: enormous suffering and humiliation for its people in total war. In short, there is scope for treachery in many types of social dealings surely, then, the fact that sociology's raw material consists of descriptions enhances rather than lessens the case for seeking independent objectively valid evidence?
The point ls a commonplace of legal procedure. Indeed, doing empirical sociology is not altogether unlike the way crimes are supposed to be solved. Detectives should be trained to treat all statements and clues, not as 'facts' but as 'evidence': that is equally suspect descriptions which need to be systematically cross checked. Moreover, in order to convict a suspect, the court itself requires certain standards of information and argument in the case brought before it. True, as we well know in Britain, detectives and lawyers often cut corners, make mistakes or become corrupt and as a result an innocent person gets convicted. This does not mean we cannot distinguish the rules of evidence and their use from their absence. On the contrary, the exposure of scandals, the fact that it is possible to talk about an incorrect conviction is sincere testimony to our belief in the importance of these rules. Deliberate perversion of standards of objective justice is both the all-too-prevalent hallmark of authoritarian rule and also the reference point of opposition to it.
The methodological problems of evidence in observing social conditions have long been familiar to historians who are faced with the further difficulty that, as E.P. Thompson puts it 'you cannot interview tombstones". Furthermore:
data' is not just 'out there to be harvested', it is not a finite quantity but rather an organic and infinite growth. Its quantity and quality will depend very considerably on the simple techniques by which it is collected. (Macfarlane, 1978, p.22)
Thus in history too, interpretation and fact are by no means independent. However, this must never be taken to mean that historical enquiry cannot be disciplined by the presence or absence of appropriate evidence. It means that to be gathering evidence is itself to be immersed in a process of rational enquiry - of corroboration of contradiction by alternative sources, internal logical coherence inherent probability and so on. These in turn are subject to the cut and thrust of rational debate. The alternative debate is the history of smears and whitewash, the 'official history' which denies the atrocities and war crimes, leaving a later generation to its sense of betrayal when it discovers the facts of what really happened in their name Elsewhere, we argued that: "In the end sociology may, like history offer few certainties and indeed be little more than constructive speculation", nevertheless, to quote Thompson again, "We must reconstruct what we can". Sociology, warts-and-all is better than no sociology at all if we are to develop a real understanding of the 'human condition' (Lee and Newby, 1982, p343).
Unfortunately, as T.S.Eliot once put it, "human kind cannot bear very much reality" and trouble comes when people prefer the certainties of blind faith rather than the uncertainty of rational enquiry. It is, therefore, worth considering what it means to reject the possibility of objective evidence and empirical research in sociology. My fear as I write this is that in Britain the discipline (for it still is that) is threatened by a descent into unreason from both within and without. Not all devotees of the current fad for 'so-called' post modernism in sociology are crude relativists but as a movement post-modernism is openly hostile to sociological research as I have understood it during most of my career. I have colleagues who are prepared to argue that the modern ideal of rationality has offered . false promise and that consequently standards of rationality them selves are not absolute (Smart, 1992, pl81). The sight of these scholars making use of inferential reasoning to defend such a view might be somewhat comic for their position implies that I can 'win my side of the debate by shooting them all. But alas, such 'solutions are found all too frequently in real life to make this a laughing matter What disturbs me about some of the latest writings are the admiring references to authors with Nazi associations: Nietzsche whom the Nazis adapted for their own seizure of the truth on the roue to power and Heidegger, a known collaborator (Rockmore, 1992).
In the present political climate, attacks on the very idea of social science strike me as either irresponsible, dangerous or both. Waves of irrational but uncontested 'evidence' impinge on every household through advertising, television and in the majority of newspapers where distortion and opinion are routinely presented as news. The point is not that people are necessarily brainwashed by this material but that only the most muted protest is or can be raised against it. As a result, what post modernist philosophers seek to prove is becoming taken for granted common sense that all information is equally prejudiced or 'biased'. At the same time, the availability of evidence about the condition of people is under assault and not even a matter of which the people themselves are generally aware. Libraries and universities which act as public storehouses of evidence have been starved of funds. Information about the activities of the state and its agencies has become, at the hands of those elected to protect it, less rigorous in form and more difficult and more expensive to obtain. Only the flimsiest ministerial acknowledgement of the need for independent standards in the gathering of official data has been given (Guardian, 14.12.1991).
If sociologists and other social scientists do not defend the idea of objective enquiry and impartial evidence who will? Racist beliefs really do not have the same validity as the sociology of racism. Mrs Thatcher's claims that everyone, even the lowest paid, had benefited from her economic miracle did not have the same truth value as the rather different carefully documented conclusions of poverty researchers during the eighties (Townsend 1991). This clash of claim and counter claim was not just power play and subjective meaning. And frankly, much of the common sense talked in the pub during the eighties has become a curse. It was just plain wrong and as a result people are suffering.
1. She added: "there are only people and families". This is wrong: there is the Conservative Party for a start, a reality sui generis as she found out shortly after.
2 This phrase has often wrongly been taken to mean that Durkheim subscribed to a group mind theory. He wrote: "The collective mind is only a composite of individual minds. But the latter are not .. . closed off from one another. They are in perpetual interaction through the exchange of symbols; they interpenetrate one another. " As a result there has become a need to understand the hidden forces which determine how this interpenetration occurs and develops, forces which individuals themselves are typically unaware. See Thompson. ( 1982) for a valuable account of this.
3. The problems of ambiguity include the use of the English word 'facts' as rather stark translation of the French word 'fait', which can also mean 'an activity or accomplishment'.
© David J. Lee The Raven 19 pp17-30
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