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COMING TO TERMS WITH SOCIAL SCIENCE
BY: FRED W. RIGGS, University of Hawaii*
ABSTRACT
The end of the "Cold War" marks an historic
turning point in the ideological struggle between "communism"
and "capitalism." It also heralds a new era with much deeper
roots, going back to the foundation of the post-Westphalian state system
in the 17th century and the recently developed new information technologies
created by the industrial and technological revolution. The collapse
of the industrial empires and the birth of a large number of successor
states, many governed arbitrarily by unresponsive and ineffectual elites,
provokes growing unrest and violence among increasingly mobilized and industrialized
populations in a complex disorganized global system. Inter-state
wars will, I think, dwindle if not vanish. Instead, the whole world, including
all its socio-cultural-political-economic sub-systems, from the global
to local and individual levels, will face mounting tides of localized wars
oriented to ethnic nationalism, illegal syndicates, a vast cartel of multi-national
corporations, and growing floods of migrants, many of them refugees from
persecution, violence and impoverishment in their home countries.
We are witnessing processes of transition to a new and fundamentally different
condition from what prevailed in the past, especially during the last couple
of centuries when all the established social sciences were born and became
entrenched in the world's universities.
Radically new academic structures, strongly influenced
by the astonishing communications technologies created by the INTERNET
and the WORLD WIDE WEB, are being born and a large number of new concepts
and terms will be needed to analyze and handle the resultant problems.
In place of the now-antiquated social sciences, we will need a new "SOCIAL
SCIENCE" capable of viewing the world as a whole and analyzing all
its parts and their interelations in this context, including its natural
as well as its social and psychological aspects and dimensions. This
paper, which provides some examples of new concepts and terms, based on
but different from familiar ideas represented by such words as 'state,'
'nation,' 'modern,' and 'western,' outlines a conceptual and terminological
approach ("onomantics") that can supplement the traditional semantic
(lexicographic) procedures which have enabled us, until recently, to handle
information and offer instruction using only well-established words and
phrases. INTERNET users know how many new concepts and terms are needed
to handle this technological break-through, but they have yet to attend
seriously to the even greater number of novel concepts and terms the massive
and far-reaching transformations in our world system will require us to
learn.
*Synopsis of paper prepared for COCTA
panel at IPSA Congress in Seoul, August 1997
LINKS TO RELEVANT DOCUMENTATION
Links on my home
page provide access to related materials, including:
- An annex to the paper providing some details
about how to implement the bottom-up onomantic approach recommended in
the text;
- A global network called 'ETHNIC-L' provides
links with international, regional, and disciplinary groups and listservs
devoted to problems involving ethnicity, ethnic nationalism, migration
and refugees, in multi-disciplinary perspective. Plans for using
this network as an experimental framework for launching a terminological
(onomantic) network in this increasingly urgent problem area are explained
in the Annex to my paper;
- An example of a paper, Turmoil among Nations,
to which a set of interlinked concept records are attached -- additional
concepts produced by anyone, anywhere, in a Web hypertext format, can be
linked together through an experimental terminological ("onomantic")
Web Page to be created soon;
- Essays on ethnic nationalism, political and
administrative design, and a possible futurist scenario, Price Indeterminacy in
a Meta-Prismatic Context that highlights the kind of new world paradigm
that will make radical supplementation of many conventional concepts and
terms necessary if we are to understand and deal intellligibly with our
coming world; and
- Several essays explaining the onomantic approach
and distinguishing it from traditional terminological and lexicographic
paradigms.
Atomz Search this site: sort by date, with annotations, or for
relevance:
For the full text see:
Come to Terms-1 ||
Come to Terms-2 ||
Come to Terms -- Annex
See also linked pages: [] Democratization and
Globalization Project || Globalization sites || Globalization Concepts || Democratization Sites []
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Posted: 5 August 1997; updated: 27 April 2001
