borders and for outer limits. Difficulties arise with the infinitesimal and the
infinite in time and space, and conceptually with the foundational, the first
principle and the ultimate argument. Troubles appear because these formula-
tions too arise in medias res.
In medias res can be taken as an empirical observation. It nevertheless is
of a high order of generality, since there appear to be no exceptions. In medias
res seems also to be part of an inescapable conceptual framework, a region in
which the empirical and conceptual fuse.^4
Consider then from the empirical side the argument which I have been
making for sociological realism. Whence did I get the ideas of the preceding
paragraphs, to mount just this line of argument about a sociological cogito?
Obviously, from the preceding chapters of this book, and from the empirical
and theoretical work of the networks of philosophers and sociologists which
have been its materials. I have not crawled into a stove, like Descartes, suddenly
and inexplicably resolving to doubt everything, then spontaneously discovering
that I cannot doubt that I am thinking in a social language. I have constructed
this argument by assimilating the arguments of intellectual networks whose
history stretches back for generations. It would be artificial to deny the exist-
ence of those historical networks, not only as ideas unfolding in time, but also
as bodies of real human beings living in material space. Since I take my own
argument seriously, I must agree that I am thinking an internal conversation
which attempts to construct a coalition of intellectual audiences, and that the
emotional energies which animate my writing come from my own experiences
in intellectual networks. The immediate reality of my own activity implies the
reality of a larger world of discourse, society, and bodily existence.
And there is no justification for drawing any sharp borders as to what
realities are supported by this admission. I cannot deny the reality of intellec-
tual networks; and I can find no reason for supposing that these networks
alone have existed, a thin band of historical existence threading back across
the centuries, without a wider social and material world surrounding them.
The social constructivist theory of intellectual life, far from being anti-re-
alist, gives us an abundance of realities. Social networks exist; so do their
material bases, the churches and schools and the audiences and patrons who
have fed and clothed them; so do the economic, political, and geopolitical
processes which constituted the outer sphere of causality. These successive
layers of context for the minds of philosophers display no sharp borders. There
is no criterion for arbitrarily stopping, for declaring that “I concede that social
reality exists; but the world of material nature does not.” It is all of a piece,
all on the continuum in medias res.
The conclusions that we arrive at by following the empirical pathway of
Epilogue: Sociological Realism^ •^861