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Pragmatism and Social Interactionism*

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PRAGMATISM AND SOCIAL INTERACTIONISM* DMITRIN. SHALIN Southern Illinois University at Carbondale This paper examines the interfaces between pragmatism and interactionist sociology. Four tenets central to social interactionism have been selected for this study: the philosophical perspective on reality as being in the state of flux, the sociological view of social structure as emergent process, the methodological preference for participatory modes of research, and the ideological commitment to ongoing social reconstruction as a goal of sociological It is argued that from the start interactionist sociologists were concerned with the problem of social order and sought new ways of conceptualizing social structure. Special emphasis is placed on the interactionists' predilection for a logic of inquiry sensitive to the objective indeterminacy of the situation. An argument is made that the failure of interactionist sociologists to address head-on the issues of power and inequality reflects not so much their uncritical reliance on pragmatism as their failure to follow consistently pragmatist tenets and to fulfill the political commitments of pragmatist philosophers. There is a solid consensus among present-day matter be left for professional philosophers to commentators about the profound impact of decide?" pragmatist philosophy on social interac- One answer to this question is suggested by tionism. This consensus breaks down, how- Kuhn's theory of paradigms. Along with sub- ever, when it comes to spelling out the exact stantive theories and research procedures, ac- nature of this impact. Some critics, mostly out- cording to Kuhn, all scientific schools include side the interactionist perspective proper, "metaphysical paradigms" or "metaphysical charge interactionism with an astructural, parts of paradigms". Normally, philosophical subjectivist and status-quo bias and lay much assumptions underlying research practice in a of the blame at the door of pragmatism (Kanter, given area are taken for granted, but in periods 1972; Huber, 1973; Reynolds and Reynolds, of crisis "scientists have turned to philosoph- 1973). Others argue that there is nothing inher- ical analysis as a device for unlocking the rid- ently astructural, subjectivist or conservative dles of their field" (Kuhn, 1970:184, 83). about either interactionism or pragmatism Whether sociology is currently undergoing a (Hall, 1972; Stone et al, 1974; Maines, 1977; crisis is beyond the scope of this paper; what Stryker, 1980; Johnson and Schifflet, 1981). directly concerns us in Kuhn's argument is that Still others detect a fissure among social in- the task of philosophical self-reflection is per- teractionists, which they trace to the division formed by practitioners in the field and not just within the pragmatist tradition between the by professional philosophers. Indeed, the pro- nominalist and subjectivist pragmatism of digious output in speculative writings by Bohr, Dewey and James and the realist and objec- Heisenberg, de Broglie, Bom, Schrodinger, tivist pragmatism of Peirce and Mead (Lewis, Eddington, Jordan, Pauli, Weizsacker, and 1976; McPhail and Rexroat, 1979; Lewis and Oppenheimer, to mention only better known Smith, 1980). names in modem physics, should convince the The question that this voluminous literature skeptics that the reflection on the a priori foun- on pragmatism and interactionism is bound to dations of science is more than a self-indulgent raise in many a head is, "Shouldn't the whole practice of wayward sociologists. As Whitehead (1938:29) put it, "if science is not to degenerate into a medly of ad hoc hypotheses, *Please address all correspondence to Dmitri N. it must become philosophical and must enter Shalin, Department of Sociology, Southern Illinois upon a thorough criticism of its own foun- University, Carbondale, IL 62901. dations." The present inquiry into the The first section of this paper was presented at the paradigmatic unity of pragmatist and interac- Annual Meeting of the Midwest Sociological Soci- tionist thought accepts this judgement and is ety, St. Louis, 1985. I thank Herbert Blumer, Thomas Burger, Lewis A. Coser, Lon R. Shelby and undertaken in the hope that it will help to il- two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an luminate some of the predicaments of modem earlier draft of this paper. I wish to acknowledge a interactionism. special debt of gratitude to Professor Igor S. Kon for More specifically, this study is intended to nurturing my interest in social interactionism. show that since its formative years, interac- American Sociological Review, 1986, Vol. 51 (Febmary:9-29) 9 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW tionist sociology contained a structural com- possibilities, waiting to be completed and ra- ponent, although its pragmatism-inspired ap- tionalized. The fact that the world out there is proach to the problem of social order signifi- "still" in the making does not augur its final cantly diverged from the traditional one. The completion at some future point: the state of study also demonstrates that interactionist indeterminacy endemic to reality cannot be methodology has a strong predilection for par- terminated once and for all. It can be alleviated ticipatory forms of research, which reflects its only partially, in concrete situations, and with paramount concern, again directly influenced the help of a thinking agent. The latter has the by pragmatist ideas, with the objective inde- power to carve out an object, to convert an terminacy of the situation. Finally, it is held indeterminate situation into a determinate one, that the relative paucity of interactionist re- because he is an active being. The familiar search on the issues of power, class and in- world of color, sound and structure is his prac- equality is not so much a reflection of the con- tical accomplishment, i.e., he hears because he servative bias that the interactionists allegedly listens to, he sees because he looks at, he dis- inherited from pragmatism as the result of their cerns a pattern because he has a stake in it, and failure to embrace fully the political commit- when his attention wavers, interest ceases, and ments of pragmatist philosophers. action stops-the world around him sinks back The terms "pragmatism" and "social in- into the state of indeterminacy. teractionism" are used here inclusively. That There is more than a tinge of post-Kantian is, Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead, despite idealism in this mode of reasoning, which their divergent views, are all considered to be should come as no surprise, given the promi- pragmatists insofar as they took a common nent role transcendentalism played in the stance against rationalist philosophy. Correla- pragmatists' formative years. Traces of tran- tively, Cooley, Thomas, Park, Ellwood, scendentalism can be detected in Dewey's cel- Blumer, and a number of other kindred yet ebration of the mind as "the constitutive author disparate writers are treated here as interac- of the whole scheme" ([I9291 1960:33), James' tionists for the sake of contrasting their views preoccupation with the world "anchored in the to those of functionalist thinkers. It is argued, Ego" ([I8901 1950, II:297), and Mead's convic- however, that the tension in the premises of tion that "what a thing is in nature depends not interactionist thought has resulted in the di- simply on what it is in itself, but also on the vision between the more voluntaristically and observer" (1929:428). Transcendentalist over- less voluntaristically oriented brands of social tones are unmistakable in the pragmatist view interactionism. .of cognition, which harks back to the idealist Finally, about the plan of the exposition. metaphor of knowing as carving. From tran- Without claiming to have exhausted the prem- scendentalism ~raermatistslearned to distrust ises of social interactionism, the following have the rhetoric of"b& facts" which, in Mead's been selected as central to interactionist words (1938:98), "are not there to be picked thought: the philosophical perspective on out. They have to be dissected out, and the reality as being in the state of flux, the data are the most difficult of ab- sociological view of society as emergent in- stractions. ." Pragmatists' resistance to be- teraction, the methodological quest for a logic haviorism as incompatible with the active and of inquiry sensitive to the objective indetermi- conscious mode of man's being in the world, no nacy of the situation, and the ideological com- doubt, also reflected the aversion to mate- mitment to ongoing social reconstruction as a rialism bred into their bones in the years of goal of sociological practice. These four apprenticeship. Salient as the elective affinity paradigm-setting features of social interac- of idealist and pragmatist thought is, it should tionism are addressed in this order. not be taken to mean that pragmatists accepted the idealist legacy uncritically: pragmatism is a STUDYING THE WORLD-IN-THE- post-Darwinian philosophy in which the prin- MAKING: THE PHILOSOPHICAL ciple of subject-object relativity was replaced PREMISES OF SOCIAL INTERACTIONISM with that of the relativity of organism and envi- ronment, the constitutive activity of Absolute " . .For rationalism reality is ready-made and Mind with the instrumental activity of orga- complete from all eternity, while for prag- nized individuals, and dialectical logic with the matism it is still in the making . ." (James, experimental logic of situation. Pragmatists 119071 1955: 167). This cherished precept
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