Weet Blok wel waar de deur zit?

Samenvatting

The text of A. Blok's inaugural lecture (Wittgenstein en Elias: een methodische richtlijn voor de anthropologie [Wittgenstein and Elias: A Methodological Direction for Anthropology], Assen: Van Gorcum, 1975) is reviewed. Blok contends that both nominalism & essentialism lead one astray & he attempts to guide one along a new track that avoids the pitfalls of both. However, the notion of 'family resemblance' (Wittgenstein's notion) that he uses, does not succeed in accounting for general terms since the boundaries of a concept so defined are inherently vague. Blok is criticized for overemphasizing the descriptive part of sociology at the expense of theory. Blok remains an old-style empiricist & fails to perceive that empirical data may be the result of the interaction of many factors that are not directly experienceable. In Van karikatuur tot kompas: een kritiek op Bloks keenistheoretische en methodische koers (From Caricature to Compass: Critique of Blok's Methodological and Epistemological Course), H. Tromp notes several misconceptions regarding nominalism. He also points out that the notion of family resemblance presupposes the presence of a theory, ie, it takes a certain perspective to say that A resembles B (otherwise everything resembles everything else). In Een nieuwe weg of nieuwe woorden? Kanttekeningen bij een oratie (A New Way, or New Words? Marginal Notes to a Sermon), A. J. F. Köbben argues that Blok's attacks are directed at strawmen & that the notion of family resemblance itself is not new in anthropology. In Repliek (Reply) A. Blok answers that it is possible to give a coherent picture of a society without appealing to laws & generalizations (as is done in some novels, eg, Dickens's work). The use of definitions is accepted as long as they can be justified by their authors. Cross-cultural studies benefit from the family resemblance approach by making it easier for the knowledge of one phenomenon to help understand another phenomenon that only 'resembles' it, yet is subsumed under the same concept. A. O.