Assessment and Perspectives

Let us begin this concluding assessment with a check-list of the main ideas presented in the foregoing chapters. Some of them can be seen as standard propositions derived from a deductive analysis, which lend themselves to empirical testing as well as, of course, further theoretical discussion. Others, by contrast, are merely interpretive, in the sense that they propose to ‘understand’ a given facet of reality in a certain way. Since both types of statement are present, I stop short of calling them ‘propositions’ in the formal scholarly sense. I simply wish to submit them as the seven core ideas that I hope the reader will, in addition to a few technical tools, retain from this book.