ABSTRACT
To recognize that a position has been rejected can only be an intellectual step in identifying what intellectual position is accepted. Such is the case for the anti-social evolutionists whose opposition and rejection of social evolution has just been explained. Social change tends to be demanded both by any change in the character of the needs-wants and in the resources of the natural environment so that maladaptation rather than adaptation obtains. The general designation ‘social process’ is proposed because innovation and its acceptance are construed to occur within and to require not merely interaction in general but a peculiar or distinctive interrelationship of processes together constituting the social process. Interaction – which Ross, Small, and Cooley use as their point of departure for explaining social innovation – is based on an idealist notion of the social as inter- and/or multi-personal activity.
