Meaning is better than structure

[ailiathena]

In trying to write my National Science Foundation grant proposal, I am struggling to formulate my goals in the form of hypotheses that can be disproved. Obviously, this is important to some science-y people. But  Geertz is a social scientist obsessed with interpreting meaning, and he really shaped my approach to anthropology. Interpretation, it

Comments

re: meaning

[anonymous]

It seems to me that you have to define meaning. The standard sociological answer would be to define it as "meaning-as-held" or "meaning-as-believed" to intentionally separate the question from meaning-in-itself. This represents the basic distinction between ontological and phenomenolgical frames of reference

Re: meaning

[ailiathena]

Yes, I'm definitely coming from a phenomenological perspective, but I don't agree that typological and pattern recognition approaches are my only options. I'm also not sure that I agree with your portrayals of a Sophistic vs. Aristotelian approach, since both of them come from an extremely essentializing perspective that I find extremely problematic. That said, I suspect with your categorizations, you would put me in the pattern recognition frame, although I would not describe myself that way. One of the failures of such approaches, as helpfully clarified by Fredrik Barth, is that "we need a viewpoint that does not confuse the effects of