The strange fate of the morphed ‘rump materialism’: a comment on the vagaries of social science as seen through Alexander Wendt's Quantum Mind and Social Science

IF 2.2 1区社会学 Q1 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

International Theory Pub Date : 2022-02-14 DOI:10.1017/S1752971921000075

Friedrich V. Kratochwil

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引用次数: 4

Abstract

Abstract In putting Wendt's recent Quantum Mind in a larger context both of his own disciplinary engagement and some larger philosophical issues, I try to avoid a hasty dismissal, since the book seems at first blush to offer a ‘theory of everything’, or an uncritical acceptance, since the desire to know what makes the world hand together has always been part of the knowledge game. As to the first problem, I find it rather odd that Wendt spends little time in justifying his particular take on quantum theory, which is far from uncontroversial. Second, I attempt to understand why he has given up on the profession trying now to solve puzzles in the field by claiming that ‘quantum consciousness theory’ provides us with an ‘ace up the sleeve’. But the fact that wave collapse plays havoc with our traditional notions of cause, location, and mass, does not without further ado entitle us to claim that all or most problems in social science dealing with issues of validity and meaning of our concepts (rather than ‘truth/falsity’, as decided by making existential assertions) have been solved by quantum mechanics.

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变形后的“残余唯物主义”的奇特命运——从亚历山大·温特的《量子思维与社会科学》看社会科学的变幻莫测

摘要在将温特最近的《量子心灵》放在一个更大的背景下，既考虑到他自己的学科参与，也考虑到一些更大的哲学问题时，我试图避免草率地驳回，因为这本书乍一看似乎提供了一种“万物理论”，或者说是一种不加批判的接受，因为想要知道是什么让世界团结在一起的愿望一直是知识游戏的一部分。关于第一个问题，我觉得很奇怪，温特几乎没有花时间来证明他对量子理论的特殊看法，这远不是没有争议的。其次，我试图理解为什么他放弃了现在试图解决该领域难题的职业，声称“量子意识理论”为我们提供了一张“王牌”。但是，波浪坍塌对我们传统的原因、位置和质量概念造成了严重破坏，这一事实并没有让我们毫不犹豫地宣称，社会科学中涉及我们概念的有效性和意义问题的所有或大多数问题（而不是由存在断言决定的“真/假”）都已经通过量子力学解决了。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

International Theory Multiple-

CiteScore

6.60

自引率

0.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： Editorial board International Theory (IT) is a peer reviewed journal which promotes theoretical scholarship about the positive, legal, and normative aspects of world politics respectively. IT is open to theory of absolutely all varieties and from all disciplines, provided it addresses problems of politics, broadly defined and pertains to the international. IT welcomes scholarship that uses evidence from the real world to advance theoretical arguments. However, IT is intended as a forum where scholars can develop theoretical arguments in depth without an expectation of extensive empirical analysis. IT’s over-arching goal is to promote communication and engagement across theoretical and disciplinary traditions. IT puts a premium on contributors’ ability to reach as broad an audience as possible, both in the questions they engage and in their accessibility to other approaches. This might be done by addressing problems that can only be understood by combining multiple disciplinary discourses, like institutional design, or practical ethics; or by addressing phenomena that have broad ramifications, like civilizing processes in world politics, or the evolution of environmental norms. IT is also open to work that remains within one scholarly tradition, although in that case authors must make clear the horizon of their arguments in relation to other theoretical approaches.