Sociological Theory and Philosophical Analysis Other Books by Dorothy Emmet
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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 from the work of social anthropologists.