15 - In conclusion

Summary

We have reached the end of this volume, and I feel the pressure to provide some closure to the multiple arguments. But how can this be done? Having been so much concerned with nonlinear dynamics, emergence, and structuration, how do we reach any definite conclusions, or, dare I claim, gains from the enterprise? In the postpositivist/postmodernist discursive mode, the belief of the Greeks that “the beginning is already half the whole story,” gives me little relief. With Bachelard and Lakatos, I, too, consider it important to maintain that the intellectual game consists not in giving all the right answers but, at least in part, in posing and grounding the historico-pragmatically “proper” questions which will, in turn, raise even more questions of an important sort. Thus, instead of “In conclusion” I am tempted to offer “An inconclusive unscientific postscript.”

But perhaps that won't do. We have reached, after all, several tentative (semireal) landmarks or, to put it in an alternative idiom, we have committed ourselves to several tentative posits (semiconstructed in an “internal realist” sense). Honesty dictates that I sum up these investments and claimed payoffs for public display and appraisal; by the same token, a prudent attitude also suggests that I display some of my further (perhaps essentially “promissory”) markers, to stake a claim to new fields that will be mined at a later time. For this heterarchical research program of social structure has a long way to go.