Download The Fundamental Question of Sociology

The Fundamental Question of Sociology: In what sense is social science distinct from
natural science at the same time as still being scientific? It cannot survive as an
independent discipline if it is ultimately reducible to natural science, or to a mere
humanistic study of arts and cultures, and so this fundamental question must be given one
unambiguous and clear answer, to be agreed upon by members of all schools of thought
in the social sciences with all their varying theoretical perspectives and practical interests.
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The question is not answered by an appeal to social theory or sociological
method, for there is too much variation and ambiguity in these fields. All these
approaches are primarily of value as techniques to be tried and tested in relation to
sociological subject-matter, they do not give sociology a unified theoretical
grounding.
It is not answered by the historical approach to social science, for this approach
tends to get tied up with making culture-relative claims that have no relevance to
true science.
It is also not answered by Gould’s distinction between the moral or religious
realm of meaning and value, and the scientific realm of theories and facts. For this
suggests that social science has to choose between being just like natural science,
as in reductionism, or just like the arts and humanities, as in relativism. But I
believe there is a unique place for true social science, akin to Durkheim’s
conception of sociology as dealing with it’s own independent subject-matter of
social facts with it’s own independent methods. But how are we to bring this
conception together into a unified vision for sociology, which can be agreed to by
everyone?
The only way is to cut to the heart of the issue of the essence of science. To see
why natural science had to fail, logically, when applied to sociological subjectmatter, and how social science, by adopting a different logic, can succeed in
relation to sociological subject-matter.
The failure of natural science when applied to society comes down to a key
process that has two aspects. Firstly, natural science relies upon formal logic.
Now it is a common prejudice to state that formal logic is incontrovertible, due to
its tautological nature, but this is due to a confusion in the use of the word
necessity. Formal logic is a set of inferences that are necessarily related. The word
necessity comes in merely as a relational term. However, many have come to use
this term in a categorical sense, as if, to say something like, ‘A necessitates B’, is
equivalent to saying ‘A entails B is a necessary truth’. The problem is that in
formal logic we are not entitled to argue for the necessity of the overall
proposition containing a logically valid inference, we are only entitled to argue
for the purely formal claim that ‘A entails B’ is the same as ‘A is necessarily
related to B’, not for the more substantial or categorical claim that ‘A entails B’ is
the same as ‘A entails B is a necessary truth’. This latter mistakenly suggests that
necessity is a category, rather than just a relation, and leads on the idea of a
category of necessary truths called tautologies, which is simply not a legitimate
claim within the formal logic. So then, if formal logic is not characterized by
being ‘tautological’, a set of ‘necessary truths’, which it is obvious it cannot be in
an era that rejects the foundationalist and realist epistemology, then what is it that
characterizes formal logic? Formal logic is determined by the kinds of inferences
it makes, by the peculiar way in which it relates it’s terms. This all comes down to
the notion of constitutivity. Formal logic is characterized by assuming constitutive
relations universally apply between all the terms it considers. What this means is
that given two terms with a set range of application to objects, things or
phenomena, the formal logic seeks to determine if one term is constituted by the
other. If it is, this is sufficient for the formal logic to be applied to these terms
relation with each other. It does not require them to be identical, as would be
suggested by the view of formal logic as a set of purely definitional truths or
tautologies. But where does formal logic discover phenomena related in this way?
Precisely, peculiarly, and specifically in the natural sciences. E.g. This is the core
of the Atomist epistemology, and it is the source of the drive to reductionism. A
man is constituted by his body, a body is constituted by its organs, the organs are
constituted by cells, the cells are constituted by atoms, etc… It applies the formal
logic rigorously, claiming that from complete and exhaustive knowledge of what
constitutes a bodily organ, say its cells, we can explain and account for the
workings of the organ. But from whence comes this confidence? Some would say
it is dogmatic reductionism, but this is not the case. They are merely applying the
formal logic through to its logical conclusion. The confidence comes from the
logic, and from the assumption that this style of logic can be applied to
phenomena universally, because all phenomena are related constitutively as the
formal logic requires. But, of course, we now know that this is not strictly the
case. Yes, formal logic applies universally to those domains we identify as the
subject-matter of natural sciences, but it does not apply to the domain of social
sciences. Why not? It is actually quite a simple and obvious fact, once you
understand the theoretical and historical background, and that is the fact that
social phenomena are not related via the notion of constitutivity. My relation with
my body may be constitutive, my bodies relation with its organs may be
constitutive, etc… but this is because I am not in society with my body. But what
of my relation with other humans, and with social institutions? Am I constitutive
of them in this social phenomenon, or are they constitutive of me? The question
simply makes no sense, because if there were such a constitutive relation between
us, then it would be observed and treated as a part of natural science by the formal
logic. But the very fact of stating that our relationship is non-constitutive either
one way or the other is one and the same as stating that our relationship is a nonnatural one, and thus, in line with the differing logic governing relations of this
type, we give it a different name classifying it as a social relation. But when we
follow the genesis of this argument through we realize that stating the existence of
a social relation is one and the same as stating that formal logic doesn’t apply to
it.
In its second aspect, the key point is that all science must have a logic and
the reason it must have a logic is because it must have a way of relating all the
phenomena that come within its domain without interfering with them or
influencing the way in which they relate, for this is the key to the neutrality and
factuality we can set up in relation to our scientific observations. Now when the
constitutive logic was falsely applied to social phenomena, it had the nasty
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tendency of influencing the phenomena in ways detrimental to scientific
investigation. Historically, the main example of this was the science of political
economy, which didn’t end up merely describing how people pursued their selfinterest in the market, but ended up prescribing that people pursue their selfinterest in the market. Now, there is nothing necessarily morally wrong about this,
for lines of action have to be prescribed somewhere in society, it is only the claim
to scientific status here that was both wrong and dangerous, and had politically
devastating consequences. Political Economy in the end was left in limbo, it
couldn’t claim to be natural science, because it’s assumptions were not universal
descriptions of human nature, but instead universal prescriptions to human nature.
But neither could it claim to be social science, because it insisted on relating its
phenomena, and still does in economics proper, via the formal logic and its
relational notion of constitutivity. So what we can learn from this, and much
sociology has already learnt this, implicitly if not explicitly, is that in order that
we may view social phenomena without inadvertently effecting the course they
take, we must view them as related regulatively. Now this is primarily a negative
notion relative to the formal logic, which will in it’s turn be replaced in the third
aspect of the process of this argument by the positive notion of logic in social
science. But we must first be clear to distinguish ourselves from natural science.
And this is achieved by adopting the regulative logic. This logic is basically the
same as the formal logic without the ability to make inferences that assume the
constitutivity of the phenomena being discussed. Thus, it is a pure logic of
reasoning consistently amongst the social phenomena that we have defined. The
problem for it, and its main weakness, is its lack of dynamism, its lack of
illustrating how the defined social phenomena are interconnected, and how they
relate to each other. This weakness is eminently observable in Weber’s use of
ideal types in sociology, for instance. They allow us a clear and coherent
understanding of social phenomena, they allow us to build up a picture of the
overall cultural and historical context of society, but they give us no means of
tapping in to the dynamic ways in which these social phenomena are interrelated.
They merely show us what is there, while providing only very vague hypotheses
as to why it is there and how it got there, and where it is likely to go in the future.
This lack of dynamism in Weber, and in Durkheim, is something that needs to be
improved upon, but this can only be done by moving on to a third aspect of this
process, where we move beyond the failure of natural science to comprehend
social phenomena, and begin to understand social science in a more positive
manner in its own right, as an independently credible and autonomous scientific
discipline.
In its positive aspect the logic of social science starts from the principle of the
identity of indistinguishables. Contrary to natural science and its vision of a grand
abstract arena of space and time for all natural events to be placed within, in
which two things may be identical except for the purely abstract difference of
being in a different place, in social science if two things are in a different place
within society or within the historical tradition of a society, then they are different
not merely in the abstract, externalized sense of being in different places, but they
are also different in some internally important sense. Now this historic specifity of
social phenomena due to the fundamental principle of their logic does not
undermine the scientific comparison of societies, for they can be compared
relative to ideal-types, which they approximate towards to different degrees, or
they can be compared based on differences in their functional organization. What
is ruled out, though, by this principle, is the experimental method of natural
science in the sense of looking for laws of social change, since social phenomena
are not repeatable based on their logic. Thus, at this stage we seem to be facing
the same problem as before of the lack of dynamism in our understanding of
social phenomena, but this is where we can now understand the fundamental and
only logical sense in which we can have a dynamic understanding of social
phenomena. There is no universal historical law of the progress of societies, and
there is no determined course that social history must follow. Instead, what there
is, is an implicit teleology underlying all social discourse, due to our own status as
organized beings who pursue ends, such that whenever we utter something we do
so unwittingly in the light of our whole social and historical context, so that all
that we utter, tacitly and implicitly, acknowledges the orientation we have been
provided with by our social background. When Weber talks of the Rationalization
of society this is true in the sense of a dynamic unfolding of an implicit
orientation to society, but it is not true in the sense of an objective process
happening in the external world. When Spencer talks of the evolutionary progress
of societies towards greater differentiation and integration, this is true in the sense
that we, as organized beings, are bound in our society to be most interested in
those areas where we are the most organized, and so we are teleologically bound
to talk about these areas in the social arena. Thus, industry and technology take on
such enormous social relevance to us, and so it is socially inevitable that they will
acquire an intricacy and complexity transcending many other phenomena, simply
because we are so focused in on these phenomena, and so see them in much more
detail. These social phenomena are not more differentiated and integrated than
others relative to some objective scale, but they are more differentiated and
integrated than other social phenomena, past or present, universally for us
humans, as social beings responding to current society. And so our teleological
orientation in our society gives a universal and dynamic edge to the social
processes happening around us. In which case, their universality is enough for
them to be logically mapped in the logic of social science, even if they may
amount to nothing in the pure objective world of natural facts. For this world, as
is established by the adoption of the principle of the identity of indistinguishables,
of space and time, has no hold over the social domain.