The quest for the Theoretical Standpoint

Now, I have been giving my personal theoretical standpoint some thought. The view that I have on human, psychological and cultural matters is largely constructed out of:
a.) theories and scholars that I buy into or want to buy into
b.) a basically realist phenomenological standpoint
c.) a notion of "good" that is worth orienting towards, rather than an evasive absolute truth
d.) a notion of both cognitive and socially constructed views of reality, that may or may not distort, or at least colour, every notion of reality

I believe that deconstruction into smaller parts must stop somewhere. Even though we might have the theoretical ability to break phenomena into smaller units, each phenomenon that can be "seen" on some level of theory - especially basic folk-notions - is worth looking at, as a sort of ontological entity. I want to help understand, not undermine. If people 'out there' utilise some notion in their daily life and actions, then that phenomenon is real to them, and worth investigating if we want to understand that level of human reality. I'm not saying that every notion of reality is equally 'real' or 'good' - just that people base their daily life on what is real to them, and this activity in daily life is what constitutes cultural and practical reality.

I think that the constellation of theoretical angles might be somehow coined through a model resembling a skewed hourglass (pardon the crude picture):

Social - Cultural
\ /
Cognitive science & psychology
/ l Neuropsychology
l /
Evolutionary
biology/psychology

Every line - starting from the top and down - must be understood as "viewed in light of...", and a line should have been going from each of 'cultural' and 'social' to the 'cognitive' level

The point of the model is to show the actual fields of interest (mainly the social and cultural in my case) descending into deeper and deeper levels of explanation (ending up in evolutionary psychology, which is a dangerous field to rely on to heavily). The drawing doesn't allow me to show it very well, but the top triangle consisting of social-sciences, cultural-theory and cognitive science is supposed to be pretty even. Social and cultural areas are mutually generative, but both grunded in individual/racual cognition.
The lower triangle, on the other hand, is supposed to be rather skewed, showing the possible venues of explanaition for the cognitive level. Neuropsychology and the evolutionary background is somewhat linked, even though it comes down to the first,wich is also largely inaccessible to science exept through tentative theories. The point of the skewedness of the lower triangle, is to show that I have more faith in neuropsychology as an explanation for cognitive sciende, but that that area must rest on a basic ground-level of evolution that we cant' circumvent in theory.

In other words; I think that the study of culture must somehow come down to an explanation trough cognition, which must in turn be more or less implicitly anchored in an acceptance of the importance of both neural levels and evolutionary background.

Thus, the center of my interest is cognitive science, because of its relevance to culture and social reality, whereas the levels of neuropsychological and evolutionary explanations of human faculty, must always be an implicit level in this construction - the most basic level of reductionism, if you will.

This is as much a mental experiment, and an attempt to align my theoretical tools, as it is a theory of any kind. It will probably be cast aside shortly, but for now it has been put into words.

That's all folks
Thanks for listening

The politics of writing theory

I have been thinking lately - mainly because I am supposed to think about something else - about the implications and moral obligations of writing for mid-level education.

On the one hand, I have a strong ideal that people should be allowed to figure "the truth" out for themselves. Mainly because I am a genX child of the postmodern, and have no clue what "the truth" might be if it - contrary to my intuitions - should exist out there, somewhere... (Probably on a beach sipping a drink with pieces of exotic fruit and an umbrella in it, because it seems to have taken a good long vacation lately...)

On the other hand, I believe that people have no chance in hell of figuring out what is going on by themselves, and If they are not given a bit of help adopting a critical perspective, they will probably end up buying the simplest and cheapest answers, mainlly peddled by right-wing populists.

Therefore, I am caught in a dilemma (apart from the fact that this is plainly an excuse from writing the paper, that I am supposed to be working on...): An article should strive to be neutral and give a varied view of the field, but on the other hand, it seems to me, that it is the duty of every published writer or artist to join in the political debate, and at least try to give people tools to shrug off populist hegemony... or an additional angle, at least.
But... doing that, I might just enter the discourse of pointless panicked leftist dribble going on in the more unfortunate varieties of critical theory, or, worse still, take part in the construction of futher one-sided political imperatives and academeese nonsense that no-one outside of the walls can benefit from.

And in all of that, the rules of "good objective science" seems to be held at knife-point by political correctness, the will to do good and publishers...

That stuff can really make your head spin.