At 06:55 AM 29/07/2006, eg wrote:
Again, I agree with these two sentences, but not the implication. We should indeed focus on the "real", and move beyond invididualism. But that doesn't mean that "analyzing the collective" requires aggregate measures. Descriptions and observations should proceed from case instances. We can thus analyze a collective (whatever it's called - network, community, nation, Frank, etc.) as the multitude of observed interactions (is the network of talk dense or sparse, tight or loose?) without extrapolating that the collective is something more or other than those observed interactions. Analyzing a collective, devoid of descriptions of case instances, is less profound (and much farther from "real") than individualism.
If the collection refers to 'completed experiences', one can analyse this kind of collection in an infinite number of ways. If we are referring to the realm of the possible, one can also use a collection of completed experiences as a starting point for an infinite number of speculations, each relying on knowledge of completed experiences, and each more profound than individual descriptions of single cases. Is the question whether the merely possible is real? We could take that as a hypothesis and see how it works out. D.