Reading a Relational Situation: The Contending Lenses

This book explicates and critically reviews the competing ways that a social arena can best be coherently described, explained and understood and that social actions within it can best be ascribed It has identified, from the epistemological and ontological dichotomies drawn in the philosophy of social sciences, a set of four mutually exclusive and mutually incompatible social-reality dispositions: naturalist structuralism, naturalist agency, hermeneutic structuralism and hermeneutic agency. These constitute the contending lens through which a cognitively consistent person can choose to frame a social arena. This, it must be emphasized, is not to suggest that such a person would necessarily have the same epistemological or ontological preferences in all social arenas. Indeed, the very point is that he or she can choose the lens through which a particular arena is to be observed and interrogated. Once a social-reality disposition has been adopted for a particular social arena, then there are a set of core values, attitudes and opinions that flow from it, which become the salient constituents of that person’s cognitive system when he or she is in that arena. This brings to the fore how a person chooses his or her preferred lens.