The Nature and Types of Sociological Theory

Don Martindale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415175128
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136225871
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First Published in 1998. This is Volume XI of twenty-two in a series on Social Theory and Methodology. Notions are widespread that sociological theory is either an industrious activity on the drawing boards of the architects of fantasy or a branch of esoterics operating in a shadowy realm of semi-darkness. The present study holds neither of these conceptions of sociological. The present study's function is to illuminate the difference between one theory and another. The power and reliability of a theory are not always evident all at once. A theory may have a power to explain what was not originally anticipated; it may also disclose the existence of problems it cannot explain.

PART ONE

Sociology and the Sciences

1

The Road to Sociology

WITH ALL HISTORICAL TIME TO DEVELOP IN, SOCIOLOGY IS ONLY ABOUT A hundred years old. As far as we can tell, our intelligence is no greater than that of men of previous societies. There is no greater potential incidence of genius. We have a broader culture at our disposal than any earlier society, but culture has accumulated in other epochs and times without the appearance of sociology. We can, of course, simply dismiss the problem of why sociology did not appear much earlier as a historical accident somehow related to the peculiar conditions of our era. But it is not an isolated event. Sociology is a continuing activity distinctive of our time. It is not the creation of one or a few men of genius but an on-going enterprise of research, study, and teaching. It provides careers for research workers and teachers. It offers knowledge and service to members of our society sufficient to justify their continuing support. If it did not, the entire enterprise would wither.

If we are to talk sensibly about sociology, we must first find out what it is that we are talking about. We might start out By defining sociology very generally as “a body of thought about man’s interhuman life,” but this does not carry us very far because, in many respects, the same definition might apply to folk wisdom and magic and religion. We come closer to the subject when we call sociology the “science” of man’s interhuman life. But even if we beg the question of what science is, we have still not really isolated sociology from competing disciplines, for historically sociology has had to fight for its own place in a noisy circle of social sciences — a battle which even today leaves it preoccupied with its identity. Perhaps, then, the best approach to a definition of sociology lies along the path of history. Sociology is a part of that great evolution of thought in Western civilization which passes from religion through philosophy to science. There are properties of modern sociology that can be accounted for only in terms of its birthright. The formula for the construction of science out of philosophy was in considerable measure fixed by the physical sciences, which pioneered the movement, and this fact has left a deep imprint on all the social sciences, including sociology. By tracing the primary relations of sociology to the other social sciences, and by exploring its ties with the intellectual and ideological movements from which it historically emerged, we can come closest to establishing the boundaries of the area that sociology claims for its own.

Sociology, Folk Wisdom, and Theology

Common-sense thinking about interhuman life occurs even in the simplest of societies. Life is made up of incidents and encounters which people reflect on and generalize. The proverbial lore or folk wisdom of a people is the essence of their “common sense,” and it is important to them because of the contribution it makes to the maintenance of their particular social order.

The folk wisdom of a people is interpenetrated by the ethos of the local society. To be sure, people everywhere work and play, make a living, fall in and out of love, make friends, come into conflict, marry, raise children, bury their dead, and so on. All such things form the objects of the “common-sense” knowledge of the society. But the way the given social order organizes and distributes access to these things is unique. The common-sense lore of a people is time-bound and normatively local — in both of these respects it falls short of science.

There are other things men do, or perhaps things that happen to them, which fall outside the framework of everyday events. They have accidents, they become ill and die. They lose loved ones. Tragedies sometimes strike in the midst of what began as great happiness. Such things tend to defy the explanatory formulas of folk wisdom. How, furthermore, is one to explain the fact that, even if two members of a society are equally diligent in the conducting of the affairs of everyday life, the good fortune of one may be matched by the misfortune of another? Even without the unexpected and tragic or extraordinary event, feelings arise out of ordinary life that are not always easy to accept or explain. Every social order prescribes goals for its members and the means for attaining these goals. The stuff of life must be crammed into socially prescribed forms. The murderous or lustful impulse must be repressed. A man may be expected to go into battle knowing all too well that it may mean his life. The individual may in fact covet his neighbor’s wife. Modern psychologists have familiarized us with the suppressed anti-social impulse that takes its secondary revenge in the form of guilt arising in the face of repression. Finally, no social order privileges all its members equally, a fact which does not make the frustrations generated within the order easier to endure.

The psychological roots of religion seem universal to mankind. They appear to lie in the demand for emotional and intellectual “closure.” Man must explain and accommodate himself emotionally to the tragic, the unexpected, and frustrating events that take place within and around his life. He feels the need even to explain and adjust to the fact of his own death. At bottom, religions seem to be collective institutional solutions to these problems.

Thus, beside the common-sense thinking of a society, another type arises with various subtypes of magical, theological, and mixed forms. In various ways this thought, too, may be concerned with the incidents of everyday life. But its point of gravity is elsewhere, in the hidden, the extraordinary, the transcendent. And when such thought is concerned with everyday events, it is often because of the unpredictable or uncontrollable factors. The magical spell is added as a warrant for the success of a hunting expedition, its intent being to control the unforeseeable accident. Black magic is worked to injure an enemy who would be dangerous to face directly. Such thinking addressed to the extraordinary — the explanation of health and illness, life and death, chance and fate — may undergo various degrees of organization, development, and sublimation. In its “purer” form, it becomes a speculative, ethical probing into the ultimate meaning of life.

A number of older theories found such theological reasoning to be the first form of abstract thought and its bearers — the “magician-priests” — the world’s first professional intellectuals. But even at this time there was a subdivision of intellectual roles, with the old man or woman — the “sage” — being thought of as the respected advocate of common-sense knowledge in contrast to the “magician-priest-philosopher,” who was defined as the specialist in the esoteric. However this may be, theology is no more the counterpart of sociology than is folk wisdom. In fact, if one searches previous societies or contemporary preliterates for the equivalent of sociological knowledge, it is not to be found. Nor will the “sage” or “magician-priest” substitute for the sociologist. Sociology lies somewhere in between.

Like common sense, sociology is concerned with the everyday, the average, the ordinary, the recurrent social event. In this respect, it differs most widely from magic and theology. However, unlike common sense, sociology is not a discipline bound to uphold the ethos of some particular social order. It seeks maximum freedom from value suppositions. On the other hand, sociology shares with the various disciplines concerned with the extraordinary a speculative and intellectual intent, but, unlike magic and religion, its spec-ulative motives are dominated by the concept of the “natural” rather than the supernatural. One may thus conceive of sociology as either extending the intellectual and speculative concerns proper to religion into the area of the ordinary; or, in reverse, as the rise from notions about the ordinary toward general, abstract explanation.

A peculiar combination of “naturalism” and “speculation” is almost the badge of a world in which the primary form of institutionalized thought is science itself.

Sociology and Philosophy

The relation between sociology and philosophy is at once more direct and more subtle than its relation to folk wisdom or theology. Sociology was one of the late offspring of philosophy. Comte even called the new field “positive philosophy” before he accepted the name “sociology” for it. It was some time before sociology was sufficiently established as an independent discipline beside its parent for the two fields to find special subject matter in each other. It has finally become possible for the “philosophy of the social sciences” to appear as a special project within philosophy and for sociology to contemplate the study of social factors important for philosophic systems as aspects of the “sociology of knowledge.”

Because philosophy was the matrix which gave birth to sociology in the nineteenth century, and because of the continuing interaction between the two disciplines, it is important to differentiate them. But first we must consider the still earlier emergence of Western philosophy itself out of magic and theology — one of the foundation developments in Western civilization, preparing the way for all subsequent intellectual movements. Philosophy had first to become distinct from magic, theology, and folk wisdom before, much later, science and, still later, sociology could become distinct from it.

The effects of magic upon intellectual life were primarily in the direction of a stereotyping of form and content. The incantation does not invite analysis. Magical tabooing of words, such as the occasional absolute prohibition on uttering the name of God, hardly promotes analysis. Or compare the taboo on many words relating to sex in our own society and the effect this taboo has on the child’s understanding of sexual matters. The requirement of letter-perfect rendition of an efficacious magical formula may even restrict expressive fluidity — to say nothing of fixing an upper limit on rational analysis. Intellectual life dominated by magic is fixed by requirements external to intelligence itself.

The step in thought from theology to philosophy was an important achievement of the human mind, one which has had its effect on human thought ever since. When speculation about the nature of man and the world occurs outside the protective confines of sacred institutions, the competition of alternative explanations becomes especially sharp. A religious institution has powerful sanctions at its disposal in securing intellectual conformity. The apostate may be punished or excommunicated. On the other hand, the believer who is challenged in his beliefs may retire to the protection of official doctrine. The very presence of official doctrine, “dogma,” or a “party line” often involves many compromises and adjustments. If one observes a dif-ference emerging between his personal beliefs and the official dogma, life is always easier if the dangerous thought is put aside. But all this is incidental to the most important point of all: so long as thought is controlled by sacred sanctions the criterion of acceptability tends to be external — outside thought itself.

All this is changed when the reasoning process takes place outside religious institutions. Viewpoints multiply, for there is no established dogma against which to measure acceptability of ideas. Most important of all, ideas are forced to stand “upon their own merit.” It may become necessary to find criteria for the acceptability of ideas within the thought process itself. The Socratic method formalized the procedure central to the transition of thought from theology to philosophy — the search for a procedure establishing the criteria of truth within the thought process itself.¹

Logic as an Example of the Rational Proof

It is the amusing estimate of Bertrand Russell in his somewhat whimsical History of Western Philosophy ² that if Socrates actually practiced the dialectic in the manner described in the Apology, the hostility centering on him is easily explained, for all the “humbugs of Athens” would have combined against him. The dialectical method is an excellent way of establishing the truth whenever logical propositions are at issue. It leads to the formation of propositions into consistent logical systems and to the discovery of logical errors and inconsistencies.

Looking back from the standpoint of a scientific world, the Socratic method appears remarkably limited precisely at the point where things become crucial — the winning of new knowledge. Even logically it was limited. When it was pressed to the interpretation that contraries have some sort of capacity to generate higher truths, or that the truth-establishing process consists in the evocation of memories from previous lives, it was on the way toward mysticism. However, if one looks at the Socratic method from the standpoint of the magico-theological conceptions of a world still dominated by religion, the Socratic method is like an open window letting in light and fresh air. It marks the decisive point of transition from theology to philosophy, from an intelligence determined by external institutional criteria to an intelligence established on the basis of the principles of thought itself. There is a sort of poetic justice in the tradition that would transform Socrates from what he most probably was, the scion of an eminent family, into a “common man.” Once one establishes truth as a property of the proper conduct of the thought process, anyone can establish truths. This important conceptual function is emancipated from social class, and a commoner is as able to find truths as an aristocrat.

The development of the Socratic method testifies to the central place occupied in Greek philosophy by the search for a way of conducting the thought process that would provide dependable results. The magnificent discovery that resulted, to be transmitted on as an imperishable ideal of the West, was the rational proof. The two outstanding achievements of Greek thought were the foundations of logic and the demonstration of the nature of mathematical truth.

Aristotle is ordinarily given credit for having laid the foundations of logic. The most important of his logical works is the Prior Analytics, which presents the theory of the syllogism — a three-termed argument resting on the logic of classes. The syllogism consists of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion. The conclusion necessarily follows from the premises, and if the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true. Thus, with the major premise “all men are mortal,” and the minor premise “Socrates is a man,” the conclusion necessarily follows that “Socrates is mortal.”

The theory of the syllogism is not as simple as this, and Aristotle went on to analyze its properties in great detail, but these ramifications, significant as they are in the history of Western thought, are not immediately relevant to the present discussion. What is most important for our purposes is the impetus that Aristotelian logic gave to the notion that the criteria for establishing the truth of anything lie within the thought process itself.

Modern students have raised three main criticisms of the syllogism. (1) There are formal defects in the system. Statements such as “all Greeks are men” do not, as Aristotle assumed, necessarily assert that Greeks exist. When the ambiguity of such a statement is resolved, it is seen to contain two statements: (a) “there are Greeks,” and (b) “if anything is a Greek, it is a man.” The latter statement is purely hypothetical, involving no necessary assertion of existence. (2) The logic of Aristotle overestimated the importance of the syllogism — leaving, for example, the whole area of mathematical truth outside its framework and obscuring its character. Finally, (3) it overestimated the importance of deduction. In Aristotle’s writings, where questions are raised which transcend the problems of the syllogism, the discussion tends to become metaphysically obscure. This may be seen in his doctrine of “essences” (qualities of a thing which cannot be changed without a loss of its identity) and his doctrine of “substance” (presumed ultimate subjects of properties). These studies transferred the task of obtaining the first premises of the syllogism to metaphysics.

Deductive inference was thought by Aristotle to be syllogistic. It was necessary only to state all knowledge in syllogistic form to avoid all fallacies. The historical fate of these brilliant logical beginnings was the transformation of Aristotelian logic into a medieval dogma and the continuance of this logical dogmatism into modern times, where it functioned as a stronghold of resistance against further development of logical analysis. The logical thought of the Greeks did not embrace the problem of deduction broadly enough to include mathematics.

Because of all these objections, many modern students are unwilling to accept Greek logic as one of the great achievements of the human mind and think of it rather as an obstacle to the general growth of logic. But such a judgment fails to take account of the sort of magico-theological thinking which Greek logic replaced. More impressive than the intrinsic logical limitations of the syllogism is the concrete demonstration which Aristotelian logic provided of the possibilities of rational proof and the dream to which it gave birth of a rationally ordered sphere which could encompass all knowledge. Syllogistic logic was a superb product of the drive in Greek philosophy toward rationality.

Mathematics as an Example of the Rational Proof

A much more universally acclaimed product of the same drive was the discovery of the nature of mathematical truth. The Greeks had inherited numerous mathematical propositions from Babylonia and Egypt. They transformed them into something quite n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• PART ONE Sociology and the Sciences
• PART TWO Positivistic Organicism
• PART THREE Conflict Theory: The Paradox of Maturity
• PART FOUR The Formal School of Sociological Theory
• PART FIVE Social Behaviorism
• PART SIX Sociological Functionalism
• PART SEVEN Conclusion
• Index