Over the last week I've been dipping into Mary Hesse's article in the Encyclopedia Of Philosophy about "Action At A Distance And Field Theory," and I'm in the middle of the field theory part and haven't made my way yet to modern physics. My impression as to the latter is that quantum physics does require action at a distance, and this is one of the things that puts it at odds with general relativity. But I'm talking through my hat. In the field theory section there are definitely field theorists who oppose the idea of action at a distance, so the assumption would be that in, e.g., magnetism, something must cross the distance, but that this something doesn't necessarily require a medium to travel through.
One way to think of this, for our purposes, is to think of the resemblance people (e.g., Wittgenstein, but he wasn't the first) as getting rid of the dichotomy between universals and particulars. So you most definitely can talk about someone's negative past experience with games as creating a general negative attitude towards games, which manifests in her reaction to this or that new game, even if the game doesn't altogether match up with any other game she's ever played before. So there doesn't have to be a universal "gameness" or a set of characteristics common to all games for her to nonetheless have a general disposition towards games in general. But I'd say that, even though her disposition was caused by a whole bunch of social facts, what the disposition applies to isn't limited to those social facts, just as what the word "game" can potentially designate isn't limited to what it's designated so far (though it is constrained by the requirement that it more or less resemble some of those things).
Your rockism example is accurate as to how people use the word "rockism," but a similar example with less of a negative result might be this: "Well, the immediate cause of Gregory's snapping at me was that I said X, which riled him up, but his snapping at me didn't really have much to do with his attitude either towards X or towards me but rather was owing to his underlying paranoia." And here there really is an underlying state of paranoia, despite there not necessarily being a set of single characteristics that applies to every manifestation of Gregory's paranoia. Which is to say, "paranoia" isn't a shortcut summary of a whole forest of social facts, it's a pulling together and understanding of those social facts in a way that couldn't be done without the concept "paranoia," even though the word "paranoia" wouldn't have any meaning without those social facts. And someone trying to understand paranoia would need to witness concrete examples of "paranoia" or to have such examples well-described before understanding the concept; I gather that these examples would be what you mean by action not at a distance.
(I think the term "rockism" was doomed at the start by the accident that Pete Wylie's gag line, "the race against rockism," ended with "ism." Of course that was also a reason for the word's popularity, in that it seemed to denote an identifiable syndrome, and so people could latch onto the word as containing explanatory power that it didn't actually have. The problem is that the work was never done to give it explanatory power, since "ism" implied that the work had been done and the power was there. The advantage of my metaphor "PBS" was that it wasn't going to have any explanatory power I didn't give it, so I had to attempt to provide the explanations and examples myself. The disadvantage was that only forty or so people ever paid attention.)
no subject
One way to think of this, for our purposes, is to think of the resemblance people (e.g., Wittgenstein, but he wasn't the first) as getting rid of the dichotomy between universals and particulars. So you most definitely can talk about someone's negative past experience with games as creating a general negative attitude towards games, which manifests in her reaction to this or that new game, even if the game doesn't altogether match up with any other game she's ever played before. So there doesn't have to be a universal "gameness" or a set of characteristics common to all games for her to nonetheless have a general disposition towards games in general. But I'd say that, even though her disposition was caused by a whole bunch of social facts, what the disposition applies to isn't limited to those social facts, just as what the word "game" can potentially designate isn't limited to what it's designated so far (though it is constrained by the requirement that it more or less resemble some of those things).
Your rockism example is accurate as to how people use the word "rockism," but a similar example with less of a negative result might be this: "Well, the immediate cause of Gregory's snapping at me was that I said X, which riled him up, but his snapping at me didn't really have much to do with his attitude either towards X or towards me but rather was owing to his underlying paranoia." And here there really is an underlying state of paranoia, despite there not necessarily being a set of single characteristics that applies to every manifestation of Gregory's paranoia. Which is to say, "paranoia" isn't a shortcut summary of a whole forest of social facts, it's a pulling together and understanding of those social facts in a way that couldn't be done without the concept "paranoia," even though the word "paranoia" wouldn't have any meaning without those social facts. And someone trying to understand paranoia would need to witness concrete examples of "paranoia" or to have such examples well-described before understanding the concept; I gather that these examples would be what you mean by action not at a distance.
(I think the term "rockism" was doomed at the start by the accident that Pete Wylie's gag line, "the race against rockism," ended with "ism." Of course that was also a reason for the word's popularity, in that it seemed to denote an identifiable syndrome, and so people could latch onto the word as containing explanatory power that it didn't actually have. The problem is that the work was never done to give it explanatory power, since "ism" implied that the work had been done and the power was there. The advantage of my metaphor "PBS" was that it wasn't going to have any explanatory power I didn't give it, so I had to attempt to provide the explanations and examples myself. The disadvantage was that only forty or so people ever paid attention.)