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Authority and Rationality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
Extract
Before an aggregation of persons can be said to constitute a community there must exist a sharing of a body of norms or values, or asystem of beliefs or morals. In sociology this conception frequentlyappears in the term “consensus,” and in political science a similar conception goes by the phrase “social contract.” The two conceptions are not identical and an important point of difference will be touched on later, but according to this position knowledge of and adherence to the fundamental rules is necessary to group unity or cohesion.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1952
References
page 104 note 1 The sociologists referred to include Durkheim, Georges Davy, Halbwachs, Bouglé, and Antoine Meillet. A convenient review of some of the anthropological materials appears in A. M. Hocart's Progress of Man. The psychologists referred to include G. Murphy, Postman, Bruner, McGuinnies, Prohanshsky, Kretch and Crutchfield, R. N. Sanford, R. Schaefer, Sherif, Pastore, and Adelbert Ames, Jr.
page 105 note 1 For example, with the exception of John Hallowell, the contributors to a symposium entitled, “Politics and Ethics” (American Political Science Review, 1946) reveal an underlying belief thatthe process of valuing can be turned off and on, more or less at will. Even the psychologist H. Cantril, who has been involved in the work of Ames and the Hanover Institute of New Hampshire, can deliver an address entitled in the style of the Enlightment, “The Development of a Scientific Morality” (Presidential address to the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, 1948), and can speak in it as though the making of “value-judgments” in one's work can be either encouraged or discouraged. Asa result he unwittingly ends by proclaiming a particularsystem of values clearly reminiscent of democratic liberalism. All this in spiteof his definition of perception as “an implicit awareness of the probable consequences an action might have for us with respect to carrying out some purpose that has value for us.”
page 106 note 1 A search for the reasons why the view has developed that communication can be neutral must take into consideration the prevalence of print in modern times. Because of its durability and of the conditions necessary for the reader to decipher it (e.g., light and concentration), print is a skeletonized and highly impersonal formof communication. For those like scholars who use it most, print hasremoved in point of time and place the communicator of words and thus made possible a view of fact statements that ignored that statements have to be stated, even though stated by persons whom one never meets or by persons dead for several millennia. In no small measure due to print, I believe, the pragmatic context of all communication has been lost sight of. The introduction of writing into communities, from what is known of it, seems to have had some effects similar to this later introduction of print.