Sociological Theory and Philosophical Analysis

255 Pages·1970·23.74 MB·English

by  Dorothy Emmet

Sociological Theory
and Philosophical Analysis
Other books by Dorothy Emmet
Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism
The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking
Function, Purpose and Powers
Rules, Roles and Relations
Space, Time and Deity (editor)
Sociological Theory
and Philosophical Analysis
A Collection Edited with an Introduction by
DOROTHY EMMET and
ALASDAIR MACINTYRE
Palgrave Macmillan
® Editorial matter and selection
Dorothy Emmet and Alasdair MacIntyre 1970
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or
by any means without permission.
First published 1970 by
MACMILLAN AND CO LTD
London and Basingstoke
AssoC£ated companies in Toronto
Dublin Melbourne Johannesburg and Madras
ISBN 978-0-333-10522-1 ISBN 978-1-349-15388-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-15388-6
The Papermac edition of this book is sold subject to the
condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's
prior consent, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it
is published and without a similar condition including this condition
being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Contents
Introduction IX
1 Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences
Alfred Schutz 1
2 Is it a Science? Sidney Morgenbesser 20
3 Knowledge and Interest Jurgen Habermas 36
4 Sociological Explanation Tom Burns 55
5 Methodological Individualism Reconsidered
Steven Lukes 76
6 The Problem of Rationality in the Social World
Alfred Schutz 89
7 Concepts and Society Ernest Gellner 115
8 Symbols in Ndembu Ritual Victor Turner 150
9 Telstar and the Aborigines or La pensee sauvage
Edmund Leach 183
10 Groote Eylandt Totemism and Le Totemisme
aujourd'hui Peter Worsley 204
List of Contributors 223
Bibliography 225
Index 229
v
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements for permission to reprint the papers in
this collection are made to the following:
For 'Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences'
and 'The Problems of Rationality in a Social World', to
Martinus Nijhoff.
For 'Sociological Explanation' and 'Methodological In
dividualism Reconsidered', to Routledge and Kegan Paul
(Publishers of The 'British Journal of Sociology'); also to
Professor Tom Burns and Mr Steven Lukes respectively.
For 'Concepts and Society', to the International Sociological
Association and to Professor Ernest Gellner.
For 'Knowledge and Interest', to the editor of 'Inquiry', the
Norwegian Research Council and Professor Habermas.
For 'Is it a Science?', to the editor of 'Social Research' and to
Professor Sidney Morgenbesser.
For 'Telstar and the Aborigines' to the editor of 'Annales'
and to Dr Edmund Leach.
For 'Symbols in Ndembu Ritual', to the Aldine Publishing
Company, to Professor Victor Turner and to Professor
Max Gluckman.
For 'Groote Eylandt Totemism and Le Totemisme
aujourd'hui', to Tavistock Publications Ltd, to Professor
Peter Worsley, and to Dr Edmund Leach (editor); and to
the Association of Social Anthropologists of the Common
wealth.
A full reference to the original provenance of each paper in
this collection is given in a footnote to its title.
VII
Introduction
The papers reprinted in this volume do in fact represent
several distinct and distinctive philosophical traditions. But
this is not at all because the editors felt any obligation to
include differing viewpoints and it is not because of any
editorial aspirations towards synthesis or eclecticism. The
criterion for inclusion has rather been that a paper should
seem to us to contribute to the clarification of and possibly
to the solution of the philosophical and theoretical problems
which arise for sociologists and anthropologists in the course
of their own professional inquiries independently of any
philosophical interests that they themselves may happen to
possess. One advantage of this criterion is that it may avoid
the suggestion, implicit in certain other anthologies, that
first, one has to select some general philosophical stand
point - such as that of logical empiricism or phenomen
ology - on epistemological or other philosophical grounds,
and then only secondly to apply the methods and insights of
the chosen tradition to the problems of the philosophy of
social science. This seems to us to get things the wrong way
round. The value and relevance of any general philosophical
standpoint to the philosophy of the social sciences can only
be demonstrated by showing the contribution that it makes
to the key problems.
We have also tried to avoid an approach which is some
times connected with the tendency to approach the problems
from a comprehensive philosophical standpoint, an approach
which ties together a number of issues and suggests that
where you stand on anyone of these will entail a corres
ponding stance on all the others. Two of the papers in this
collection are in fact specifically aimed at separating out
questions that have been bundled together by others in this
way. Professor Morgenbesser's 'Is It A Science?' (2)
distinguishes the questions 'Are the methods and concepts of
IX
the social sciences similar to or dissimilar from those of the
natural sciences?' 'Are the basic theories of the social sciences
reducible to some suitable theory in the natural sciences?'
and 'Is the aim of the social sciences to discover laws?' Mr
Lukes's 'Methodological Individualism Reconsidered' (5)
distinguishes four different theses which might be asserted by
someone who wished to claim that facts about social
institutions ought to be explained by reference to facts about
individuals, theses which are logically independent of
each other. To make this kind of distinction is obviously
necessary if any progress at all is to be made in the
philosophy of the social sciences and in particular any
progress in directions which may be illuminating to social
scientists themselves.
In placing such emphasis on the problems of the social
scientists we have to be careful not to fall into another error.
Social scientists are understandably and rightly intolerant of
philosophical evaluations of their work which rest on a very
partial knowledge and comprehension. But in insisting upon
the need for wide-ranging and first-hand knowledge of any
disciplines about which one may intend to philosophise social
scientists may seek to canonise the present state of their own
disciplines in a quite illegitimate way. An academic
psychologist who reviewed Charles Taylor's book on the
philosophy of psychology, The Explanation of Behaviour,
complained in a somewhat shrill way that while philosophers
accept the methods, concepts and theories actually employed
by physicists as setting the standards for what physics ought
to be, they refuse to treat the actual practices of
psychologists as setting the standards for psychology. This
complaint - apart from its ignoring of all too obvious
differences between the present state of physics and that of
psychology - seems to involve a misunderstanding of the
philosophy of science.
What scientists actually do can never of itself provide a
norm for what they ought to do, even in physics. The
existence of 'German physics' under the Nazis - 'German
physics' was, roughly speaking, physics minus those
discoveries which had been made by Jews - and of 'German
mathematics' is only the most striking example of the
innumerable ways in which the scientific community may in
x
part or in whole be led or misled away from the norms of
scientific practice. But what are these norms? We would
make a mistake here if we tried to articulate a body of rules
which are abstract enough to have no reference to the
specific subject-matter of any particular science and which
taken together are such that to follow them is to satisfy the
necessary and the sufficient conditions which are required if
one's methods are to be scientific. Rules which constitute
necessary conditions for this, certainly; but there are always
in each specific well-developed science methods, procedures
and concepts the justification for the use of which is only to
be found in the prior decisions of that science. The very
subject-matter appropriate to a given science comes to be
identifiable only via the theories of that science.
Yet in saying this we have spoken of 'well-developed'
sciences. Are the social sciences in this sense well-developed?
One crucial point to be raised by anyone who wants to
answer this question concerns the relationship of the
different social sciences to each other. Economics is defined
by its methods, not by its subject-matter. Political science is
defined by its subject-matter and not by its methods.
Psychology is defined partly by methods and partly by
subject-matter. In the natural sciences there are of course
similar contrasts to be found. But what there is no parallel to
in the relations of the natural sciences to each other is the
relationship of sociology to the other social sciences. For on
the one hand sociology, using as it does a wide variety of
methods, and approaching an even wider range of subject
matters, might seem to be almost a residual category, a rag-bag
containing everything social and human not appropriated by
economics, political science or psychology. But on the other
hand, for precisely the same reasons, sociology may be taken to
be the master science of the human sciences, raising questions
about possible relationships to which the more limited inquiries
may blind themselves by the very fact of their being limited.
The focus of the papers in this anthology is sociology in
the wider rather than in the narrower sense. This means that
some of them are concerned with problems that are of
importance for all social science and indeed for all the human
sciences. Others are concerned with problems of a more
specific kind and some of the most interesting of these arise
Xl