I heard about ideographic vs. nomothetic in a lecture about sociological theory, but I didn't know that Kant coined these terms. This is indeed what I meant with historical vs. regular behavior (exceptional vs. expected events) - the contrast betwen narrative, descriptive and irreducible explanations on the one hand vs. predictive, comparative and compact explanations on the other hand.
The sentence "human agents are telic, they organize around imagined future states" sounds interesting, can you explain it a bit? I also like the lens metaphor (a social theory as a conceptual system through which people see how their world works in a different way). If we use this metaphor, the original question was if there is a lens to see the whole system. Probably you are right, the most promising route seems to be to identify common processes of interaction. Yet perhaps the basic common processes of social interaction are already known and carry well-known names: Power, Freedom, Authority and Domination (Weber's "Herrschaft"), Discipline, Peace, Solidarity, Commitment, Progress, Conflict, Resolution, Resistance, Rights, Obligations, Conformity, Innovation, Association (Weber's "Verband") The interesting thing about all these abstract concepts is that they become concrete, observable and measurable phenomena in Multi-Agent Systems. Max Weber for example defined power, authority, discipline, etc. in concrete terms of social interactions among persons (i.e. individual agents), for instance in the case of "Macht" (power) "Macht bedeutet jede Chance, innerhalb einer sozialen Beziehung den eigenen Willen auch gegen Widerstreben durchzusetzen" (power is the chance of an "agent" to realize the own will in a social action even against the resistance of others "agents"). -J. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
