The Sociology-philosophy Connection

Mario Bunge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781560004165
• eBook ISBN: 9781351473675
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Most social scientists and philosophers claim that sociology and philosophy are disjoint fields of inquiry. Some have wondered how to trace the precise boundary between them. Mario Bunge argues that the two fields are so entangled with one another that no demarcation is possible or, indeed, desirable. In fact, sociological research has demonstrably philosophical pre-suppositions. In turn, some findings of sociology are bound to correct or enrich the philosophical theories that deal with the world, our knowledge of it, or the ways of acting upon it.

While Bunge's thesis would hardly have shocked Mill, Marx, Durkheim, or Weber, it is alien to the current sociological mainstream and dominant philosophical schools. Bunge demonstrates that philosophical problematics arise in social science research. A fertile philosophy of social science unearths critical presuppositions, analyzes key concepts, refines effective research strategies, crafts coherent and realistic syntheses, and identifies important new problems.

Bunge examines Marx's and Durkheim's thesis that social facts are as objective as physical facts; the so-called Thomas theorem that refutes the behaviorist thesis that social agents react to social stimuli rather than to the way we perceive them; and Merton's thesis on the ethos of basic science which shows that science and morality are intertwined. He considers selected philosophical problems raised by contemporary social studies and argues forcefully against tolerance of shabby work in academic social science and philosophy alike.

1

The Relevance of Philosophy to Sociology

Two centuries ago, no scholar seemed to have felt the need to prove the relevance of philosophy to social studies nor, indeed, to any other field of inquiry. At that time philosophy and the sciences were still one. But they had already began to become estranged: the sciences were becoming increasingly specialized and rigorous, whereas many influential philosophers began to wallow in Romantic mud.

By the mid-nineteenth century, philosophy had lost its grip on social studies, psychology, and linguistics, and had moved far away from natural science and mathematics. True, Comte founded a whole philosophy—but he did not engage in social research. By contrast, Mill was a social scientist, but he kept too close to Comte’s system to count as an original philosopher. As for Marx and Engels, as well as Menger and Weber, they were at the same time social scientists and amateur philosophers. But, because of their attachment to their heroes—Hegel and Kant respectively—they made no novel technical contributions to philosophy.

The situation had not improved one century later, when the eminent sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld (1962: 463) could rightly complain that “[p]hilosophers of science do not pay attention to the empirical work in social research which is actualy going on today.” He could have quoted Popper’s (1945) eccentric thesis of the autonomy of sociology, or Winch’s (1958) extravagant claim that sociology is a branch of the theory of knowledge.

Things have not changed much since Lazarsfeld’s scolding. For example, in his book on the logic of the social sciences, Habermas (1988) does not quote a single contemporary social study. Likewise, in their books on the subject, neither Hilary Putnam (1978) nor John Searle (1995), two top American philosophers, quotes a single paper or book in the social sciences. They write about social science much as Kant wrote about geography, namely without ever having left home.

However, deep down the “positive” sciences never gained the total independence from philosophy proclaimed by Comte and his heirs. Moreover, it can be shown that such autonomy is not just undesirable but impossible. First, because all the social sciences make use of philosophical concepts such as those of thing, property of a thing, process, knowledge, datum, hypothesis, evidence, truth, argument, and society. Second, because all the sciences presuppose some extremely general principles, such as the logical principle of noncontradiction, the ontological principle of the reality of the external world, and the epistemological principle of the knowability of the world. Third, because the philosophers of science are bound to make some contribution, positive or negative, to the way sociologists tackle the study of social facts and the analysis of social theory. Suffice it to recall the strong influence exerted by positivism, historical materialism, neo-Kantianism, pragmatism, phenomenology, and analytic philosophy.

In short, whereas Comte’s problem was to cut the umbilical cord that had joined science to philosophy, ours is to exhibit the vast and deep overlap between the two. However, not all philosophy has been beneficial to science, particularly to social science. For instance, Kant and his followers decreed that the sciences of man cannot be objective; Hegel and the Marxists were mired in the mysteries of dialectics; the positivists have a healthy respect for facts but a sickly fear of theory; the utilitarians and the hyper-rationalists overlook the social constraints on individual agency; and the postmodems would have us ignore facts and jettison rationality altogether. So, we have still to solve the problem of how best to join philosophy and science, in particular sociology. To indulge in metaphor, the problem is to transform a rowdy and barren common-law union into an orderly and fertile marriage.

Not every bride will do: only a science-oriented philosophy will be able to interact fruitfully with science and, in particular, sociology. Such philosophy can contribute to the advancement of sociology by identifying problems, analyzing and refining approaches, elucidating general concepts, unearthing presuppositions, analyzing and organizing theories, evaluating tests, encouraging interdisciplinary connections, and debunking pseudoscientific and antiscientific tendencies. Let us peek at these various tasks.

1.1 Problems

Philosophers are supposed to have a knack for seeing problems where others don’t. Hence, they may help social scientists identify new problems, cast doubts on accepted solutions, or even suggest approaching in new ways old but unsolved problems. This is because authentic philosophers, far from being narrow specialists, have a world view that may serve as a general orientation or road map. We can dispense with a road map only if we do not know where we want to get to—as the Cheshire Cat would have told Alice.

A world view may help us spot holes in our background knowledge. And gaps in the extant knowledge is precisely what problems are. Which is a reminder that problems do not come out of the blue but from examining what is known. In other words, every problem presupposes some body of knowledge, however poor. This is why the more we know, the more new problems we can pose.

Although philosophers do not have a special expertise in posing particular scientific problems, their interest in generalities and their methodological skepticism may prompt them to ask some questions of interest to the sociologist. Here is a random sample of innocent-looking questions. What makes people join in voluntary associations? Given that all social systems, even revolutionary parties, resist change in their midst, how can such inertia be quantitated? How can the concept of social order be defined? Does inequality spur or hinder personal and social development? Is all utopian social thinking useless or worse? What, if any, is the use of counterfactual speculation?

Once an interesting, significant, and presumably soluble problem has been spotted, philosophers may help handle it in some phases of research. In fact, they may do the following.

1. Help clarify the statement of the problem in the light of their general vision and with the help of their logical tools.
2. Help list the conceptual and empirical means required to tackle the problem concerned—means that may have to be crafted if not available.
3. Help recognize whether the proposed solution is such or just a jumble of opaque sentences couched in the jargon of a particular school.
4. Help notice the logical consequences of accepting or rejecting the proposed solution.
5. Help identify the empirical evidence relevant to the checking of the proposed solution.

In principle, philosophers who have no interesting scientific questions to ask, nor can be of any help in solving any scientific problems, should not be noticed by scientists.

1.2 Approaches

Whatever is seen has been looked upon from some viewpoint or other: there is no vision from nowhere. For example, social wholes can be looked upon either as indecomposable totalities (holism), as aggregates of autonomous individuals (individualism), or as systems of interrelated individuals (systemism). A fourth approach is excluded. However, pure holism and pure individualism are hard to implement, because wholes do not hover above their components, and these are never fully free to do what they want because they are now constrained, now stimulated, by their relations with other people.

For instance, everyone knows that Durkheim was a holist and Weber an individualist. So they were—up to a point. For example, Durkheim postulated the existence of a collective conscience and a collective memory, which makes him a holist. But, like Weber (and Marx before him), Durkheim (1988 [1895]: 81-2) admitted that individuals are “the only active elements” of society. And he stated that, whenever individuals of any kind combine, they form things possessing new (emergent) properties. These two theses taken together are typical of systemism rather than holism. In short, Durkheim—like Marx—wavered betwen holism and systemism.

Nor was Weber a consistent individualist: he wavered between individualism and systemism. For example, he held that rationality, an individual trait, coevolved with the economy and the polity. He explained the decline of slavery in the Roman empire as a result of the end of the wars of conquest—which had been the main suppliers to the slave market—rather than of calculated decisions of the slaveholders. His thesis on the link betwen Protestantism and the “spirit of capitalism” links individual beliefs and feelings with capitalism, which is a socioeconomic order, not just the aggregate of capitalists. And the very title of his main work is composed of two words banned from his murky philosophical credo: “economy” and “society.” In short, Weber’s scientific work does not conform to the social philosophy he learned from Dilthey via his friend Rickert.

There is, then, a third ontology of social matter in addition to holism and individualism, namely systemism. This is the view that every thing is either a system or a component of some system—where a system is of course a complex object whose parts are held together by bonds of one or more kinds (see Bunge 1979). In particular, all features of society—economic, cultural and political—are of a piece. Though distinguishable, they are undetachable. Clearly, systemism encompasses both individualism—since it takes composition into account—and holism— since it emphasizes structure or organization.

Systemism is often mistaken for holism, in particular with Talcott Parson’s (1951) fuzzy concept of action systems. His holistic and idealistic version of the concept of a system, as well as his opaque prose, have brought discredit upon the very word “system” among the students of society. Something similar applies to Niklas Luhmann (1990), Parsons’s last follower.

But the concept of a system, if not the word, is just as alive in social science as it is in mathematics, natural science, and technology. The reason is that every science and every technology deals with systems of some kind or other, whether conceptual or material: number systems, families of functions, manifolds, or hypothetico-deductive systems (theories); physical systems such as atoms, or chemical ones such as electric batteries; cells, multicellular organisms, cardiovascular systems, nervous systems, or ecosystems; machines or communication networks; and social systems such as business firms, schools, religious congregations, armies, governments, or NGOs. Hence, trying to avoid the word “system” just because of its association with Parsons or Luhmann is like boycotting the word “nation” only because it is abused by nationalists.

The concept of a system is central to sociology because every person is part of several “circles” (systems), and behaves somewhat differently when acting in different systems. The latter, in turn, are affected by their components. In short, no agency outside some system, and no system without agency—whence change. Hence, to define an individual as a node in a self-existing social network—the way Marx did—is just as mistaken as to characterize the individual as a passive toy of higher- level entities. No networks without persons, and no person outside all networks.

True, a particular individual may be identified as the item that is a member of every one of a certain family of classes. But in turn every class is defined as the set of individuals with certain common properties. Although for analytic purposes we may focus either on individuals or on wholes, in reality every individual is part of a whole, and every whole exists and changes by virtue of the actions of its components. Hence individualism and holism may be regarded as components or projections of systemism. The former emphasizes composition and overloooks structure, whereas holism minimizes both—and the two ignore the natural and social environment, as well as the mechanisms that make a system tick. Only systemists analyze a social system into its composition, environment, structure, and mechanism. Whoever does this is a systemist even if he does not call himself such.

I submit that systemism is the natural approach to take for anyone interested in social structure and, particularly, in the mechanisms that maintain or alter that structure. The reason is simply that every structure is the structure of some system or other: there are no structures in themselves, any more than there are the structureless systems. More on this anon.

1.3 General Concepts

Philosophers, like mathematicians, specialize in general ideas. In particular, they deal in hypergeneral concepts, such as those of thing and property, system and component, space and time, change and stability, causation and chance, meaning and truth, data and hypothesis, confirmation and refutation, value and norm. All of these philosophical concepts and many more occur in sociology. Hence their clarification should be of interest and value to sociologists, all the more so since they are as tricky as they are central.

Take, for instance, the concept of social structure. Though central to sociology and, indeed, to all of the social sciences, few if any sociologists have defined it in clear terms. Here is where philosophers can help. They may start by noting that “social structure” is just a specification of “structure,” whence it it convenient to begin by elucidating the latter. Let us do it.

In mathematics and other advanced sciences, structures are predicated of complex objects, such as sets and systems, namely thus. The structure of a complex object X equals the set of all the relations among the components of X. Actually this is what may be called the endostructure of X. If X happens to be embedded in an environment, the relations between the components of X and its environment may be called the exostructure of X. And the union of the two sets constitutes the total structure of X.

If X happens to be a social system, then the social structure of X is just the total structure of X. For example, the social structure of a business firm equals the set of work relations among its components, plus the business relations among the firm and its customers, suppliers, lawyers, and out-of-house consultants.

However, this is not the end of the story, because there are two kinds of relation: those that make a difference to the relata and those that don’t. The former may be called bonds or ties. For example, marriage, employment, trading, education, and political allegiance are bonds. By contrast, the spatio-temporal relations do not affect the relata: at most they may make bonds possible or impossible. Hence the structure of a social system can be split into two mutually complementary sets: those composed by bonds or ties, and those composed of nonbonding relations, such as those of being older than or richer than, or of being interposed between two given individuals.

If the previous definitions are accepted, then such expressions as “age structure” and “income structure” turn out to be incorrect. Since they consist of families of classes of equivalent age or income, they should be called “age equivalence classes” and “income equivalence classes” respectively.

Obviously, the concept of social structure is only one of the many key sociological concepts that raise philosophical problems. Others in the pile are those of agency, function, rationality, power, social class, and social progress. For example, is every action individual, or is it legitimate to speak of social action, and if so in what sense? Shall we dispense with the concept of social function just because of the flaws of functionalism, or do we tacitly use it whenever we describe what a particular social system does? Is “rationality” an unambiguous term, or does it designate many different concepts? What are influence and power: things or relations; and if the latter, in what sense can one speak of power sources? In what sense, if any, are social classes more (or less) real than biological species? And how is the concept of social progress to be defined: as identical to economic growth, technological advancement, political enfranchisement, decrease in social inequality, or enhancement of the quality of life? Every one of these questions is not only scientifico-philosophical: it is also ideological. Which is a reminder that even a rigorously scientific social study can be an ideological minefield—a good reason for keeping philosophically alert.

1.4 General Presuppositions

All research, whether empirical or theoretical, proceeds in the light of a number of logical, ontological, and epistemological presuppositions or tacit asumptions. For example, the need for clarity and logical consistency are usually taken for granted—except of course by the postmodems, who take pride in “weak thinking.” Besides, most social scientists admit the existence of irreducibly social facts—that is, facts that, though produced by organisms, are not biological like eating or feeling pain. This presupposition is f...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword Raymond Boudon
• Preface
• 1. The Relevance of Philosophy to Sociology
• 2. Mechanism
• 3. Explanation
• 4. Quality, Quantity, Pseudoquantity, and Measurement in Social Science
• 5. The Lure and Disappointment of Rational Choice Theory
• 6. Popper’s Social Philosophy
• 7. The Enlightenment and Its Enemies
• 8. Sociology of Science: From Marx to Merton and Beyond
• 9. The Constructivist-Relativist Sociology of Science
• 10. In Praise of Intolerance toward Academic Charlatanism
• References
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects