Rationale for the philosophy of social science

The philosophy of social science is one of the smaller sub-disciplines of philosophy, and many universities have only a single course in the subject. In contrast to larger fields such as ethics or epistemology, the philosophy of social science involves a much smaller part of the intellectual spectrum and audience within the field of philosophy. So how is this discipline defined by scholars who help to constitute it today? What are some of the intellectual challenges that drive the field forward?

One way to proceed in trying to answer these questions is to take a quick look at the descriptions of the field offered by other philosophers in recent books and collections. There has been a lot of activity in the field in the past decade, so we have a lot to work with.

Here is how Daniel Steel and Francesco Guala motivate the subject in their 2011 collection, The Philosophy of Social Science Reader:

Social science studies topics -- such as economic growth, employment, crime, social inequality, cultural conflicts, and so on -- matter to almost everyone, and philosophy is important to social science. For example, there is little consensus across the social sciences as to basic methods, aims, and fundamental assumptions about human beings, and disputes on such topics are inevitably linked to long-standing discussions in philosophy. The answer to the second question [why to publish a new anthology] is that the philosophy of social science has changed quite dramatically over the last two decades. So a new anthology is required to keep track of the best research, and to map the moving boundaries of this important subfield of philosophy. (1)

They single out four major themes to characterize how the field has moved in the past two decades -- disunity, interdisciplinary, naturalism, and values. And their volume is organized around seven parts: "Values and social science," "Causal inference and explanation," "Interpretation," "Rationality and choice," "Methodological individualism," "Norms, conventions, and institutions," and "Cultural evolution."

In his more specialized collection in 2009, Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Philosophical Theory and Scientific Practice, Chris Mantzavinos offers this description of the field:

Philosophy of science examines "scientific knowledge." It tries to illuminate the specific characteristics of science, the way it is produced, the historical dimensions of science, and the normative criteria at play in appraising science…. The philosophy of the social sciences, on the other hand, traditional deals with such problems as the role of understanding (Verstehen) in apprehending social phenomena, the status of rational choice theory, the role of experiments in the social sciences, the logical status of game theory, as well as whether there are genuine laws of social phenomena or rather social mechanisms to be discovered, the historicity of the social processes, etc.  (1)

Mantzavinos's organizing topics include: "Basic problems of sociality," "Laws and explanation in the social sciences," and "How philosophy and the social sciences can enrich each other." The first has to do with social ontology; the second has to do with explanation; and the third has to do with cross-over problems that affect both social science and philosophy (cooperation; virtuous behavior; and the hermeneutic circle).

Mantzavinos correctly emphasizes the importance of linking the work of philosophers on these topics to the practices of working social scientists:

The enterprise is motivated by the view that the philosophy of the social sciences cannot ignore the specific scientific practices according to which scientific work is being conducted in the social sciences and will only be valuable if it evolves in constant interaction with the theoretical developments in the social sciences. (1)

 Ian Jarvie and Jesus Zamora-Bonilla's very interesting 2011 collection, The SAGE Handbook of the Philosophy of Social Sciences, is another important recent compendium in the philosophy of social science. Jarvie describes the discipline in more encompassing terms in his introduction to the volume:

As a set of problems, the philosophy of the social sciences is wide-ranging, untidy, inter-disciplinary and constantly being reconfigured in response to new problems thrown up by developments in the social sciences; in short, disorderly. As an institutionalised discipline, by contrast, philosophy of the social sciences emerged from the academic division of labour that fosters specialization and professionalization, that is, order and discipline. There is always a tension between the unruliness of intellectual inquiry and the urge towards order and discipline. (1)

Jarvie offers some interesting observations of the historical path that the discipline of the philosophy of social science has taken. He provides a perspective that is intermediate between philosophy and sociology of science; he is interested in characterizing both the intellectual influences that pushed the field and some of the institutions within which the field developed.

The field is already big enough to be fragmented. Three rough divisions would be: literatures deriving from economics and politics; from psychology and from sociology, anthropology and history. Those interested in economics lay much stress on testability, methodological individualism and rational choice. By contrast the latter group is much given to discussing causation in history and society, the nature of social wholes, problems of meaning and the social construction of reality. Psychology is an area where much of the discussion we might think of as philosophy of the social sciences is carried out in the pages of its own journals. (5)

Jarvie also provides a very interesting table of topics are they are represented in anthologies in the philosophy of social science from 1953 to 2007 (Table 1.2).

It is interesting to observe that scholars in other fields have tried to understand the history of the logic of the social sciences in quite different terms than those adopted by philosophers. George Steinmetz is a good example. He is a highly talented and innovative historical sociologist who has made very important contributions to issues about methodology and theory within sociology. (A particularly interesting journal article is "Odious Comparisons: Incommensurability, the Case Study, and 'Small N's' in Sociology"; link.) Steinmetz's 2005 collection on the influence of positivism in the social sciences, The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and Its Epistemological Others, is well worth considering as a sociologist's version of the philosophy of social science anthologies considered above. And the gist of the volume and the methodologies pursued are quite different. Here is Steinmetz's description of the purpose of the volume:

This collection explores the vicissitudes of positivism and its epistemological others in the contemporary human sciences. The volume's overarching goal is to provide a mapping of the contemporary human sciences from the standpoint of their explicit and especially their implicit epistemologies, asking about the differences and similarities among and within these disciplines' epistemological cultures. Taken together, the essays provide a portrait of epistemology and methodology (writ large) in the contemporary social sciences. (1)

So the volume is about the logic and epistemology of the social sciences. But it is also about the concrete sociological history of the development of the social science disciplines:

This book also offers the rudiments of a comparative historical narrative of these disciplinary developments since the beginning of the twentieth century, with an emphasis on the period beginning with World War II. Recent writing has pointed not just to the present-day conjuncture of epistemological uncertainty but also to the middle decades of the twentieth century as critical moments in the transformation of the social sciences' deep culture. (1)

There is also a substantive final goal for the volume: to lay the conceptual space necessary to conceive of alternatives to the positivist framework for social science theorizing.

The other overarching aim of this book is to survey the landscape of alternatives to positivism in the human sciences. (2)

The volume provides a number of interesting perspectives by very talented sociologists on these topics, including especially contributions by Margaret Somers, William Sewell, Andrew Collier, Michael Burawoy, Sandra Harding, and Andrew Abbott. Each of them turns our attention a quarter-turn away from highly abstract conceptual research, to a nuanced effort to understand how ideas, institutions, and frameworks have played out in the social sciences in the past fifty years.

Here is my own statement of why the philosophy of social science is important, included in my contribution "Philosophy of Sociology" in Fritz Allhoff's 2010 collection, Philosophies of the Sciences: A Guide:

The importance of the philosophy of social science derives from two things: first, the urgency and complexity of the challenges posed by the poorly understood social processes that surround us in twenty-first century society, and second, the unsettled status of our current understanding of the logic of social science knowledge and explanation. We need the best possible research and explanation to be conducted in the social sciences, and current social science inquiry falls short. We need a better-grounded understanding of the social, political, and behavioral phenomena that make up the modern social world. Moreover, the goals and primary characteristics of a successful social science are still only partially understood. What do we want from the social sciences? And how can we best achieve these cognitive and practical goals? There are large and unresolved philosophical questions about the logic of social science knowledge and theory on the basis of which to arrive at that understanding. And philosophy can help articulate better answers to these questions. So philosophy can play an important role in the development of the next generation of social science disciplines. (295)

It appears that there are important differences in the approaches to understanding the role of the philosophy of social science contained in these various passages. There is a fairly traditional "history of thought" approach, that attempts to document the way in which this sub-discipline took shape within the larger discipline of philosophy. There is a "sociology of ideas" approach that tries to link certain research traditions to a given set of research institutions and larger social priorities. And there is a philosophical approach that tries to work out what questions really are most pressing when we consider the challenges of the social sciences.

(The graphics at the top illustrate several very different ways of trying to make sense of a disparate set of related academic disciplines.)

Behavioral science

(1958-59 class of Fellows at Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences; link)

Sometimes the rubric "behavioral science" is used to capture some of the research areas of fields like sociology, anthropology, political science, and social psychology. In some ways this usage is no more than an administrative convenience, a way of grouping disciplines into schools. But the phrase has implications beyond this that are worth highlighting.

First, what does the label mean? We might paraphrase the idea as "the scientific study of human behavior in social settings". This definition emphasizes the social dimension of action, but it focuses on the behavior rather than the context.

Choosing this rubric rather than its companion, "social science," suggests a shift of emphasis from the social setting (structures) to the actual behavior of the individual actors. Are there patterns we can identify in the ways people behave in various specified settings? And since the 1950s the expression has been used to focus on the processes of cognition and decision-making that underlie the individual's activities in the world. So cognitive science and fields making use of rational choice theory have often been included within the umbrella as well. Herbert Simon's work plays a central role in this aspect of the field ("Theories of Decision-Making in Economics and Behavioral Science"; link).

This is the "behavioral" part of the label. What about "science"? This part of the label brings along a set of implications about the nature of the studies encompassed: measurement, prediction, precision, statistical generalizations and patterns. These are positive valences or connotations for a variety of purposes, including the goal of gaining significant funding for research. But they also appear to give lower priority to the ideas of theory and hypothetical entities and the messy complexity of large sociological theorizing; the implication is that behavioral sciences are solidly empirical and observational, whereas the social sciences are "soft science".

Is this a helpful move? Yes and no. In its favor, the label pushed forward a particular agenda of research into the underlying components of social action. But it also served to suggest that the methods of other areas of the "social" sciences were not quite up to snuff.

One of the most prominent locations for "behavioral science" research in the United States is the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (link). The Center was established as one of the first major investments of the Ford Foundation in 1954. Leading scholars helped to found the Center: Robert Merton, Paul Lazarsfeld, Donald Marquis, Ernest Hilgard, Herbert Simon, Bernard Berelson, and Ralph Tyler. Here is a revealing gloss on the nomenclature contained on the website: "It wasn't too great a leap then to assume that we needed a social science, or behavioral science (the term coined and preferred by Ford as a means of disassociating the enterprise from socialism and even communism that were so under attack at the time) to solve our major problems." This comment illustrates the "scientific politics" that surround the development of disciplines and fields of research in the social sciences.

So there is some reason to think that the nomenclature of "behavioral science" serves a scientific-political purpose: to direct American social science research in a particular set of directions, and to discourage research that extends in more theoretical, comparative, and "macro" directions.

An interesting set of essays that try to make sense of the idea of "cold war social science" is provided in Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens, Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature (2012). The volume maintains a degree of distance from the idea of "cold war social science", but some of the contributors highlight the forces that were at work in the funding and institutions of the social sciences that created a degree of alignment between social science research and national security. Particularly interesting is Hamilton Cravens' contribution, "Column Right, March! Nationalism, Scientific Positivism, and the Conservative Turn of the American Social Sciences in the Cold War Era". Here is the publisher's description of the volume as well as the table of contents; link.

Historians of sociology and classical social theory

Several readers of the recent post on Raymond Aron asked about other surveys of the history of sociology that are sometimes considered helpful. So I've pulled a couple of books off the shelves to mention as sources. I'm sure that readers will have additional suggestions.

(Here is a post that attempts to map the field of sociology as it currently exists; link. And here is another post that considers some of the ways we might try to treat the history of sociology; link.)

Surveys including classical social theory (Marx, Durkheim, Weber)

History of Sociological Analysis



Specialized treatments of individual sociologists



Contemporary essays on the history of sociology

Titles

Julia Adams, Elisabeth Clemens, Ann Shola Orloff, Remaking Modernity
Tom Bottomore and Robert Nisbet, editors, A History of Sociological Analysis
Craig Calhoun, Sociology in America
Alex Callinicos, Social Theory
Lewis Coser, Masters of Sociological Thought
Anthony Giddens, Politics, Sociology, and Social Theory
Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory
Hans Joas and Wolfgang Knobl, Social Theory: Twenty Introductory Lectures
Steven Lukes, Durkheim
John McMurtry, The Structure of Marx's World-view
Robert Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition
Fritz Ringer, Max Weber: An Intellectual Biography
Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins
Lawrence Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage
George Steinmetz, The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences
Allen Wood, Karl Marx

Readers, what are your preferred books on this subject?

Raymond Aron as historian of sociology

How can we best tell the story of the development of sociology as an empirical social science? Raymond Aron undertook to do so in Main Currents in Sociological Thought (2 volumes) by reviewing the main sociological ideas of the greats: Montesquieu, Comte, Marx, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Pareto, and Weber. The book was first published in France in 1965 as Les étapes de la pensée sociologique, and in its English translation in the United States in the same year. Much has changed in sociology in the intervening half century; so how does Aron's work hold up? Is this still a valuable approach? And can we learn something important about the thinking of these particular sociologists, or about sociology more generally, by re-reading Aron?

Here is one aspect of his approach that is distinctly dated: Aron attempts to place post-war sociology within a space defined by Soviet sociology and academic American sociology.

Marxist sociology is essentially an inclusive interpretation of modern societies and of the evolution of social types. The primary object of sociological investigation, according to our colleagues in Moscow, is the discovery of the fundamental laws of historical evolution….  A sociology of the Marxist kind is synthetic, in the sense that Auguste Comte assigned to this term: it comprehends the whole of each society; unlike the specific social sciences, it is distinguished by its all-encompassing design. It seems to grasp society in its totality, rather than any particular aspect of society. (2-3) 

American sociology reveals, in general, exactly the opposite characteristics. American sociologists, in my own experience, never talk about laws of history, first of all because they are not acquainted with them, and next because they do not believe in their existence…. American sociology is fundamentally analytical and empirical; it proposes to examine the way of life of individuals in the societies with which we are familiar. Its energetic research is aimed at determining the thoughts and reactions of students in a classroom, professors in or outside their universities, workers in a factory, voters on election day, and so forth. American sociology prefers to explain institutions and structures in terms of the behavior of individuals and of the goals, mental states, and motives which determine the behavior of members of the various social groups. (5) 

These two schools … do not include the whole of what is practiced all over the world under the name of sociology. But these two schools, which are the most typical ones, form the opposite poles between which fluctuates what is called sociology today. (6)

This is obviously simplistic; it is a Cold War interpretation of sociology that doesn't hold up well for the subsequent several decades of research and theory development in the disciplines of sociology. But what about the substantive accounts he offers of these seven theorists? Here are a few snippets:

Montesquieu:

Montesquieu was much more of a sociologist than Auguste Comte. The philosophical interpretation of sociology present in The Spirit of the Laws is much more "modern" than the same interpretation in the writings of Auguste Comte…. I do not consider Montesquieu a precursor of sociology, but rather one of its great theorists. (13) 

What is [Montesquieu's] aim? Montesquieu made no secret of it. His purpose was to make history intelligible. He sought to understand historical truth. But historical truth appeared to him in the form of an almost limitless diversity of morals, customs, ideas, laws, and institutions. His inquiry's point of departure was precisely this seemingly incoherent diversity. The goal of the inquiry should have been the replacement of this incoherent diversity by a conceptual order. (14)

Marx:

Marx's thought is an analysis and an interpretation of capitalistic society in terms of its current functioning, its present structure, and its necessary evolution. (149) 

What is the basis of this antagonism characteristic of capitalist society? It is the contradiction between the forces and the relations of production. The bourgeoisie is constantly creating more powerful means of production. But the relations of production -- that is, apparently, both the relations of ownership and the distribution of income -- are not transformed at the same rate. The capitalist system is able to produce more and more, but in spite of this increase in wealth, poverty remains the lot of the majority. (151) 

The aim of his science is to provide a strict demonstration of the antagonistic character of capitalist society, the inevitable self-destruction of an antagonistic society, and the revolutionary explosion that will put an end to the antagonistic character of modern society. (153) 

In my opinion, the center and the originality of Marxist thought lies precisely in this avowal of a necessity which is, in a sense, human but at the same time transcends all individuals. Each man, acting rationally in his own interest, contributes to the destruction of the interest common to all. (173)

Tocqueville:

Tocqueville is a comparative sociologist par excellence; he tries to determine significance by comparing types of societies belonging to the same species. Now, since I personally consider the essential task of sociology to be precisely this comparison of types within the same species, I feel it is worthwhile to set forth briefly the leading ideas of a man who in Anglo-Saxon countries is regarded as one of the greatest political thinkers of the nineteenth century, ... and yet who, in France, has always been neglected by sociologists. (238)

Each volume closes with a sort of "conclusion" -- the first volume in the form of a discussion of how Marx and Tocqueville understood the Revolutions of 1848, and the second in the form of a substantive comparison of Durkheim, Pareto, and Weber.

So how does Aron's history of sociological thought measure up? His chapter on Marx is a very good exposition of Marx's key ideas -- historical materialism, exploitation, alienation, and the relationships that exist between Marx's thought and his predecessors.  There is also a serious effort to see how these ideas relate to the current (post-war) realities of capitalism in Europe and North America. For example, he explores how the workings of the modern corporation relate to the theories of private property that Marx presupposes (200 ff.). This ninety-page chapter serves as a very good introduction to Marx's thinking as a social scientist.

Likewise, Aron's discussions of the other figures he treats are stimulating and insightful and give an accurate presentation of the sociologist's thought. His discussions of Durkheim and Weber are particularly good. This kind of discursive summary and discussion of the theories is valuable for the reader who is just beginning his or her study of the great figures of sociological theory.

What the work does not provide is a view of the sociology of knowledge that might be pertinent to these theories -- what problematics the thinkers were driven by, what assumptions they made about the empirical investigation of a contingent social reality, and how they fit into their contemporary research communities. The theories are treated as finished systems rather than bodies of thought that developed out of consideration of particular problems of social understanding. Partly this may reflect the fact that these "founders" were not actually "professional" social scientists and were often driven by issues deriving from large philosophical theories as much as they were guided by specific empirical problems.

The question of how to define "a science of society" is a deeply important one, and it would be very interesting to try to interpolate answers to this question into Aron's narrative. In this respect Steven Lukes's intellectual biography of Durkheim, Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work: A Historical and Critical Study, provides a much more probing examination of this issue in Durkheim's thought and context.

(Here is an earlier post on the discipline of the history of sociology, here is a post on Durkheim's status as a "professional" sociologist, and here is a post on the development of sociology in France after World War II. Here is a short biographical sketch of Aron's professional life provided by the European Graduate School; link.)

Organizations and the Chicago school

Andrew Abbott is a fascinating sociologist, and he is an expert on the Chicago School. His book Department and Discipline: Chicago Sociology at One Hundred provides an excellent analytical discussion of the theories and people of the school. So his contribution to The Oxford Handbook of Sociology and Organization Studies: Classical Foundations, "Organizations and the Chicago School," on the place of organizations in the research tradition of the Chicago School is doubly interesting. The piece is posted here on Abbott's website.

The piece is interesting for a number of reasons. First, it gives Abbott an opportunity to articulate once again what he thinks is most distinctive about the Chicago School approach to the study of society. Second, it allows the reader to infer how Abbott himself thinks "organizations" ought to be studied. And third, it presents a very interesting example of how to do the sociology of a knowledge field.

In several ways Abbott thinks that the perspectives offered on "organization" by the Chicago School sociologists are more insightful than those provided by the other more mainstream approaches in US sociology -- "the Harvard based human relations school, the Weberian tradition descending from Parsons through Merton at Columbia, and the more formal and economic approach associated with March and Simon at Carnegie Tech" (399).

This additional insight starts with the grammar of organizations. For the Chicago School, organization is more verb-like, a process, 'the organizing of social life', whereas for the other main traditions organization is a noun, a concept that refers to a static thing to be studied.  For Abbott this is an important differentiating factor in the Chicago School approach generally: a tendency to look at social affairs as an active and dynamic set of processes rather than a settled and stable set of durable structures.  "'The world', in the ringing phrase of the Chicagoans' philosopher colleagues George Herbert Mead, 'is a world of events'" (401).

Abbott argues that there are complicated reasons why the Chicago School is not regarded as having developed a significant sociological theory of organizations.  One part of the story is the fact of inter-paradigm politics. Influential figures in the human relations school at Harvard made deliberate efforts to minimize the Chicagoans' involvement in organizational studies (402).  Another part of the story is the fact that the Chicago School contribution to this field of study took place largely through dissertations rather than through large theoretical treatises.  And finally, there is the historical fact that American organizations underwent profound change from 1920 to 1960, both nationally and in Chicago.  The super-sized organizations of giant corporations, federal bureaucracy, and the army emerged in the years of World War II; whereas much of the research agenda of the Chicago School was set in the earlier part of the twentieth century.

Nonetheless, Abbott argues here that there is indeed a broad body of work within the Chicago School on the subject of organizations, and it is of high quality.  It presents an alternative way of engaging in a sociology of organizations.  He picks out three themes around which to organize the Chicago research that he studies here:

(1) static aspects of the interiors of organizations, (2) diachronic aspects of single organizations, and (3) aspects of relations among organizations. (402)

Referring to Charles Richmond Henderson, he writes:

Like most of the Chicago sociologists, Henderson located what we now call organizations as one among many types of 'institutions'. The concept of institutions was general at the time, denoting any body of social behavior or structure dedicated to carrying out what we would now call a function of society. (404)

Abbott finds that Henderson and Small supervised thirty-one dissertations, and nine of these were relevant to the topic of organizations: stockyards, churches, the steel industry, and employment agencies, for example.  Abbott finds that "the focus is much more on dynamics: institutionalization, ossification, change, and evolution" (407). Another feature of the Chicago "sociological imagination" was an abiding interest in peripheral social roles -- delinquents, hobos, criminals, and taxi dancers (412). This conforms to the Chicago penchant for studying the social particular and the Chicago tendency towards progressive causes. But he also finds that the division of academic labor shifted during the 1930s, with the study of organizations going to the political economists rather than the sociologists (409).

One of the sociologists whom he cites is Paul Goalby Cressey, whose sociology dissertation centered on the organization of the "taxi dance hall." The dissertation was published as The Taxi-Dance Hall: A Sociological Study in Commercialized Recreation and City Life.  Abbott praises this work:

The other Chicago works on entertainment institutions -- Paul Cressey's The Taxi-Dance Hall (1932) and Walter Reckless's Vice in Chicago (1933) -- are first-rate organizational studies.  Cressey's analysis of types of dance halls touches on the resource dependencies of the dance halls, the evolution of different types of halls, competition and specialization among them, and, of course, locational patterns. (413)

Another work that he admires is a dissertation by Edwin Thrasher:

A final work of this type is Edwin Thrasher's The Gang (1927), probably the ultimate Chicago statement of organizations as things that are always in transition. For Thrasher, gangs are rooted in communities, and thus are evidence of ongoing 'social organization'. But for us, Thrasher's study provides clear evidence that the organizations Chicagoans found most interesting were those that were the most transient. (414).

And here is another study that Abbott admires:

Even more extraordinary, however, is Ernest Shideler's 'The Chain Store' (1927). This is a comprehensive organizational analysis of the emergence of a new organizational form.... This is organizational sociology of a comprehensiveness and theoretical sophistication that would not be seen again for another fifty years. (415)

World War II brought about a set of changes in organizational America that made the Chicago School approach less appealing to the mainstream. "The conflictual, processual, local theories of the Chicago School made little sense in a world now conceived as grand, unified, and even static, a huge mechanism for steady expansion in a non-ideological, managed world" (416).  But this stability was short-lived, and Abbott believes that the Chicago approach is once again worth studying. Here is how Abbott concludes:

What then are the lessons contemporary organization theory can learn from the Chicago organizations tradition and its vicissitudes? The most important lesson is that there is no necessary reason for seeing the social world as a world of organizations. The Chicago School's sublimation of organizations into an epiphenomenon of social processes reminds us that to see the social world in terms of organizational entities -- as the human relations school did -- is to take a quite historically specific view, one anchored firmly in the worldwide importance of large, stable bureaucratic structures in the years from about 1925 to 1975.

But that epoch of stable, fixed social structures is over, Abbott seems to say, and the fluid, shifting, and event-ful social world that we now confront is better studied using the approaches of the Chicago School. We now face "a world of rapid turnover and change in organizations, a world of continuous organizational restructurings and financial prestidigitation, of networks and arm's length relationships, a world in which the employment and production structures that were laboriously built by scientific management and human relations have been deconstructed through outsourcing and offshoring" (419).

And for that more fluid social world, the Chicago School approach is very well prepared.

European philosophy of social science

There is an active and extended group of scholars in Europe with a very focused concentration on the philosophy of the social sciences. A good cross-section of this community gathered in Rotterdam Monday and Tuesday this week for a small conference on social mechanisms at the Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics (link). These are for the main part younger scholars up to 15 years out from the PhD. And they are a genuinely impressive group of researchers.

There is a common set of topics and references that bind this extended research community together from Finland to Belgium to the Netherlands to Italy. They share a focus on social explanation. They are intellectually committed to the construct of "causal mechanisms" rather than causal laws. They have affinities and connections to the Analytical Sociology network, though few would explicitly identify themselves as analytical sociologists. Jim Woodward's theory of causation, the classic paper by Machamer, Darden, and Craver ("Thinking about Mechanisms", 2000), and Carl Craver's theorizing about mechanisms and levels in the neurosciences represent a few common intellectual landmarks, and almost all of these young scholars are current with the latest twists and turns of Peter Hedstrom's theories.

Finally, there is a decided absence of classic European voices about the social sciences -- conversations never invoke Bourdieu, Habermas, or Gadamer. This is a community organized around the intellectual values of analytic philosophy -- clarity, logical rigor, analysis, and causality.

There is also a high degree of interaction among members of this group. Mini conferences and workshops are able to bring many of them together, with the European rail system making it feasible to travel from London, Amsterdam, and Paris for a short conference in Ghent. In my observation this easy interaction stimulates a great deal of intellectual progress year after year, both individually and collectively.

As one small example, Bert Leuridan's effort this week to specify a rigorous relationship between meso and macro levels of a social system will certainly be fruitful for a number of us as we think further about this issue. And likewise, I will be interested to reflect further on Petri Ylikoski's call for a "flat" understanding of social causes. These examples illustrate the micro-steps of the advancement of a body of thought.

Sometimes it is difficult to see whether an intellectual field is progressing or just retracing old ground. Lakatos's ideas of "progressive" and "degenerative" research communities seem useful here. European philosophy of social science seems to be making real progress in this generation.

There is one academic reality that is worrisome. Many of these young scholars are making their way on the basis of research appointments and post-doc positions. These opportunities are pretty well funded by European universities and governments -- substantially more so than in the US. But many of these positions have a maximum term of six years. And the prospects of a regular faculty position in Europe seem bleak. A department chair estimated to me that only 20% of PhDs eventually find regular academic positions. This suggests an academic ecology that may prove stifling for the kinds of innovation we now see.

I think there could be a useful piece of research within the new sociology of ideas advocated by Neil Gross and and Charles Camic (link) based on this example. It wouldn't be difficult to draw out a network map of relationships among these philosophers, the major institutions that facilitate their work, and the movement of various new ideas through their conference papers and published work. Looking backward, it would be feasible as well to reconstruct the generation of writers and scholars who helped shape this generation's intellectual agenda. And I think the results would be very interesting.

It would also be interesting to begin developing a shared map of centers and locations of work on the philosophy of social science in Europe. Here is a start -- it's set for public access, so please feel free to add other points of interest, including centers, conferences, and concentrations of researchers.


View European Philosophy of Social Science in a larger map

Race and the Chicago School

The Chicago School of sociology has often gotten a fair amount of credit for bringing the study of race into the academic discipline of sociology in the early decades of the twentieth century. Robert Ezra Park, in particular, is taken as a pioneer with his theories of a "race relations cycle", his work with Booker T. Washington, and his sponsorship of some of the first African American PhD students in American sociology. But Stephen Steinberg gives this history a very different interpretation in Race Relations: A Critique. His book provides a basis for a different "sociology of sociology" from that offered by Andrew Abbott in Department and Discipline: Chicago Sociology at One Hundred.

Steinberg begins his account with the presidential address of Everett Hughes in 1963 at the American Sociological Association -- a momentous year in civil rights history. This was the central question posed by Hughes:

Why did social scientists -- and sociologists in particular -- not foresee the explosion of collective action of Negro Americans toward immediate full integration into American Society? (kl 119)

How indeed, did sociology miss these key features of American life and inequality in its formative years in the early part of the twentieth century? This is an important core question for the sociology of knowledge: how did theorizing about race enter American sociology? And what social and institutional factors influenced the shape that theorizing took?

Steinberg believes there were very powerful forces within leading American universities, including historically black universities, that shaped the discourse away from "radical" views of the facts of racial oppression in the United States. Boards of trustees were populated by members of the business elite, and significant funding flowed to universities through foundations whose officers had their own views of how the facts of race should be presented. Radical and strident views of endemic racial inequalities were unwelcome, and "unwelcome" could mean the end of an academic career.  Steinberg draws attention to the case of Edward Bemis, a young economist who was critical of the power of the private owners of utility companies. "The Chicago gas trust retaliated by denying the university cut-rate prices so long as Bemis remained on the faculty" (kl 496) -- an example of the use of economic power to shape the intellectual content of the university.

Essentially, Steinberg's argument amounts to a severe critique of the orientation towards race in the formative framing of the topic of race in Chicago sociology, including especially Robert Park. The core phrase was "race relations."

While the term "race relations" is meant to convey value neutrality, on closer examination it is riddled with value. Indeed, its rhetorical function is to obfuscate the true nature of "race relations," which is a system of racial domination and exploitation based on violence, resulting in the suppression and dehumanization of an entire people over centuries of American history. (kl 203)

To frame the topic of race around "race relations" is to de-dramatize the situation of discrimination, exploitation, violence, domination, and racism that characterize race in the United States -- including Chicago in the 1910s. The frame of "race relations" suggests that the issue is fundamentally one of separate racial and ethnic communities whose relations need to be guided and managed. And this framework leads the sociologist's eye away from the underlying facts of oppression and discrimination that set the stage for life for African Americans, from slavery through reconstruction and through Jim Crow. These conditions of inequality, discrimination, and violence were visible to the common observer; but they became invisible in sociology. Steinberg refers to this as an epistemology of ignorance (kl 518).

Much of Steinberg's account takes the form of a sociological biography of Robert Parks, in some ways similar to Neil Gross's treatment of Rorty (link). Steinberg wants to understand how the fiery voice that Park expressed in his pre-academic journalism in support of the Congo Reform Association was transformed into the quietistic, non-engaged sociologist of Hyde Park. And his theory is a combination of personal calculation and institutional constraint: calculation about what kinds of theoretical expressions would forward his career, and institution constraint about how a more engaged and truthful Park would have fared within the discipline of sociology (not well!). The collateral idea of "objectivity" in social science comes into the story as well. It gives an apparently scientific basis for rejecting activist or radical scholarship, on the grounds that the researcher is advocating rather than observing.

An important formative influence on Park was his seven-year service as publicist and speech writer for Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee. Steinberg believes that Washington's ameliorativist view of the situation of African Americans was fundamental to the framing that Park would give to race at the University of Chicago.

Did Park give scholarly exposition to Washington's accommodationist logic, whose central feature was the avoidance of conflict and acceptance of the racial status quo? Is this why sociology failed to confront, much less oppose, racial oppression? Does this bring us closer to understanding why sociology failed to anticipate the Civil Rights Revolution? (kl 355)

It is important to note that Steinberg does not maintain that more truthful perspectives were unavailable or unimagined.

Whether black scholars remained behind or in front of the veil, there emerged a black radical tradition--sometimes muffled, at other times assertive--that has challenged the main currents of thought on race and racism among mainstream sociologists. (kl 163)

There were such voices -- W.E.B. Du Bois, Oliver Cox, or C.R.L. James, for example -- but they did not come to set the stage for race analysis in sociology because of their activism and their association with Marxism.

Steinberg believes that Park was influential within sociology, not because of the originality of his ideas about race, but because those ideas fit with the assumptions of the powerful men and institutions who governed universities:

It is not my contention that, minus Park, the historiography of race would have been fundamentally different. After all, Park was hired precisely because he was in sync with the prevailing intellectual and ideological currents, and and without Park, some other person would have emerged to serve as the exemplar of the race relations school. A likely prospect was W. I. Thomas, who had staked out a position similar to Park's in his paper on "Education and Cultural Traits" at the conference on the Education of Primitive Man. (kl 436)

Steinberg notes this great historical irony: Hughes had written a negative review of Cox's Caste, Class, and Race in 1948; and the same issue of Phylon included a recollection of Du Bois by Herbert Aptheker, writing "We must agitate, complain, protest and keep protesting against the invasion of our manhood rights; we must besiege the legislature, carry our cases to the court and above all organize these million brothers of ours into one great fist which shall never cease to pound at the gates of opportunity until they fly open" (kl 168). So Hughes had in fact been exposed to the elements of sociological thinking that a more realistic approach to race in America would require; he had simply not recognized it.

(Tom Sugrue has a very good review of Steinberg and several other recent books in The Nation.)

Making Peter Berger

Peter Berger declared himself a humanistic sociologist throughout much of his career, including in his important book with Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. This isn't exactly a common identification for an American sociologist in the 1950s. So how did he get there?

This is an interesting question in its own right, since Berger has had significant influence at various points in the nearly fifty years since the publication of Social Construction. But it is also interesting in the context of the theorizing offered by Neil Gross about intellectual itineraries and the situation of the intellectual within a social and personal context.  Gross's case study of the development of Richard Rorty's career as a philosopher is a brilliant case study within this approach (link).  So it is interesting to consider how this perspective might play out in a treatment of Berger.

An important source for considering this question is Berger's intellectual autobiography, Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist: How to Explain the World Without Becoming a Bore, published at the latter end of his career in 2011.

A major part of Berger's intellectual development was his training in the PhD program in sociology at the New School for Social Research in the early 1950s. He describes this experience in a fair amount of detail.  The New School in the 1950s was a central locus for European sociology in the United States, and Berger absorbed much of the frameworks of thought associated with Weber, Durkheim, and phenomenology.  One important influence on him there was Alfred Schutz:

I suppose that the central concept I learned from Schutz was that of "multiple realities," including the manner in which a sense of reality is kept going in the consciousness of individuals. (19)

One sociological constant throughout Berger's self concept as an academic is his adherence and dedication to the ideas of Weber: "The only orthodoxy to which I continued to adhere was a Weberian understanding of the vocation of social science" (76).  Here is his thumbnail description of what Weber meant to him:

Thus I early on identified with the core elements of a Weberian approach: society as constituted by actions inspired by human meanings; sociology as the attempt to understand these meanings (Verstehen); the use of "ideal types"--theoretical constructs that only approximate social reality; the relation among meanings, motives, and actions; the institutionalization of the state, the economy, and class; and sociology as "value-free." (23)

By this feature perhaps we can say that Berger's thinking proceeded within one of the dominant paradigms or intellectual frameworks of European sociology; so not "counter-hegemonic".  But it is also the case that his early influences at the New School were not "mainstream" sociology in America.  Berger describes his own allergy to quantitative sociological research ("Years later I took a summer course in statistical analysis at the University of Michigan. It was a disaster;" 26), and he didn't fit neatly into the emerging contours of cutting-edge sociology in America in any of its versions.

Another aspect of his formation as a sociologist was his experience in the US Army as a draftee immediately following the completion of his PhD in 1954.  He asserts that the experience of living and training with men from a broad cross-section of American society gave him a sensibility to the variations of experience, values, and aspirations that exist in our society.  And the accidental experience he had of serving as a clinical social worker in the Army gave him an understanding of the power of extensive interviews in furthering sociological understanding of ordinary life.

What I had not anticipated was that my new assignment would turn out to be a unique learning experience -- not about the actual business of the clinic (though that too was quite interesting), but about America. Thanks to the US Army, I received precisely the education that I had sought in studying sociology and that the New School was unable to provide. (47)

A key part of Berger's originality in the field is the idea of a "humanistic" sociology.  What does he mean by this?  He consistently offers two ideas: debunking illusions and lies, and linking sociological research to the modes of reasoning in the humanities. Here is how he characterizes the "humanistic" version of sociology:

The term humanistic in the subtitle of Invitation to Sociology had two meanings. It suggested that the methodology of sociology should place the discipline close to the humanities -- specifically literature, history, and philosophy.  Of course that is the sort of methodology I obtained at the New School. But the term also suggested that the discipline could serve a liberating purpose -- to free individuals from illusions and to help make society more humane. … 

Sociology derives its moral justification from its debunking of the fictions that serve as alibis for oppression.  Significantly, I singled out racial persecution, the persecution of homosexuals, and capital punishment, the ultimate cruelty.  Sociology liberates by facilitating a standing outside one's social roles … and thereby a realization of one's freedom. At the end of the book I use a metaphor that has become widely known: Sociology suggests that we are puppets of society, but unlike puppets we can look up and discover the strings to which we are attached, and this discovery is a first step toward freedom. (75) 

Sociology is akin to comedy because it debunks the social fictions. By the same token it is potentially liberating. It shows up the "bad faith" by which individuals hide behind their roles and forces them to confront the reality of their own freedom. (72)

Berger attributes at least a part of his conviction about these two aspects of sociology to his experience of teaching as a young instructor in the segregated South:

These experiences help to explain why, a few years later, I wrote about sociology as having a "humanistic" purpose in unmasking the murderous ideologies underlying the death penalty, racism, and the persecution of homosexuals. (64)

His sociological research originated in the sociology of religion, and he continued to write on this topic throughout his life. Why so?  And how does this interest intersect with his frequent self-ascription of "theologian"?

The sociology of religion is certainly a core Weberian topic for historical sociology, so the fact that Berger identifies strongly with Weber may partially explain his choice of the topic.  But this doesn't seem right, given Berger's narrative in Adventures.  Berger's interest in the topic seems more religiously inspired; he refers frequently to his own "theological" approach.  He writes repeatedly about his own movement across the landscape of Christian belief:

I was writing [my first novel] at a time when my emancipation from my youthful neo-orthodoxy had made me consider seriously whether I would now have to define myself as an agnostic if not an atheist. (86) 

It was the question of theodicy that had brought me close to abandoning my Christian faith. (86)

So it seems likely that his own religious needs were an important part of his desire to write about religious experience.

Here is how he describes the intellectual framework that he and Luckmann conceived of in preparation for writing a book on the sociology of knowledge -- which eventually became Social Construction:

Specifically, we came to undertake a synthesis of several strands of theory that have often been understood as contradictory: the so-called voluntaristic approach commonly attributed to Max Weber, which emphasized that society is created by the meaningful acts of individuals; the approach, strongly represented by the Durkheimian school of French sociology, that emphasized social institutions as facets that resist the acts of individuals; and, finally, the tradition of American social psychology, mostly deriving from George Herbert Mead, which studied the way in which individuals are socialized into their roles. (81)

This gives something of an idea of Berger's core ideas as a sociological theorist and researcher -- his intellectual agenda.  But how did Berger relate to the discipline, and the status structure, of American sociology itself?  Berger writes frequently in Adventures about his distance from the mainstream:

I had realized by now how marginal I was to the mainstream of American sociology, and after all, I was nursing dreams of building an empire with our new approach to sociological theory. (85)

His marginality took various forms: a PhD in a decidedly heterodox and non-elite graduate program, teaching appointments in a series of non-elite institutions, and none of the early indicators of "star" status that the discipline of sociology had to offer (elite grants and fellowships, book prizes, etc.).  He notes that a book that he is especially proud of, Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective, was ignored by the professional world of sociology when it appeared in 1963; and with evident satisfaction, he notes as well that it went on to sell well over a million copies.  And he is also frank about his aspirations:

I wanted out of Hartford, not because I was unhappy there but because (perhaps misguidedly) I wanted to be in a proper Sociology Department, with graduate students in sociology.  Thus Invitation to Sociology had a subtext, a plea to fellow sociologists: Please invite me! (76)

He is equally frank in describing the striking success and influence of Social Construction: "Someone suggested that it was the most read sociology book written in the twentieth century. That is doubtful. But the book was widely noticed right after publication in America and elsewhere as foreign translations appeared" (89).  The book had wide appeal, and Berger was gratified that this was so.  But it did not result in his becoming one of the leading stars of the sociology world.

Here is how he characterizes his intellectual location, within the field of American sociology in the 1960s. in a reflection on the possible influence of Social Construction:

For just a few years after 1966 there was a narrow window of opportunity for our approach to sociology, since especially younger colleagues were disillusioned by the double dominance of so-called structural-functional theory and quantitative methodology; hence the initially favorable reception of the book. But then, almost immediately afterward, there occurred "an orgy of ideology and utopianism" with which neither Luckmann nor I could identify. (91)

(Essentially he is referring here to the sweeping appeal of the New Left and Post Modernism in the academic world and among students.  These were movements to which he was strongly opposed.)

In other words, the intellectual framework which Berger and Luckmann hoped to create in the 1960s did in fact come into coherent focus in Social Construction; but the opportunity to genuinely shift the focus of the field came and went.  He disparages two offshoots that might be thought to be intellectual descendants or cousins -- ethnomethodology (Garfinkel) and constructivism (Foucault and Derrida) (93 ff.).

And he concludes that he never did become a part of the elite leadership group of American sociology:

As the years went by, I was even assigned the role of a grand (even if definitely out-of-style) old man. But I became an exile, not only from my parochial alma mater [the New School] but from the wider elite culture. Given the nature of the latter, this has not been such a bad thing. (108)

So there seem to be several important strands to this intellectual autobiography. First, Berger gives a strong impression of the importance of what Gross refers to as "self-concept" in the development of his ideas and theories in sociology.  His religious beliefs and questions, his personal rejection of racism and homophobia, and his original and guiding thought about "multiple realities" seem to have guided many of the choices that he made in his academic life.

Second, there is the strand of "academic field" and the constraints and incentives which the field creates for the young scholar -- the insight that drives Bourdieu's understanding of the development of an academic field.  These ambitions and aspirations are plainly important to Berger at various points in the narrative, and they led to some significant choices in his academic life.  But the opportunism that is associated with the Bourdieuian concept seems largely absent in the development of Berger's academic career through middle age.  Even the "exile" that he describes, from the New School to Rutgers, stemmed from choices he made that arose from his self concept in attempting to redirect the Department of Sociology when he became chair.

And finally, Berger never did reach the pinnacle of elite status that Rorty did in philosophy or Kenneth Arrow did in economics.  In his own assessment, the intellectual tides of the field passed him and his insights by.

In other words, Berger's intellectual trajectory seems to follow largely from his self concept, and the ideas and movements of thought that were personally important to him, and very little from his calculating assessment of how best to move upward in the status structure of the discipline.  He was fully aware of that structure; but he seems not to have deviated from the course his own values and convictions set him upon.

(Here's a very critical and worthwhile review of Adventures in The Global Sociology Blog. The review opens with these words: "Well, it is not often that I dislike a book as much as I did Peter Berger's Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist."  SocProf is highly critical of the conservative trend that Berger's thought and affinities took in the 1970s and later, and he argues that this turn leads Berger to eliminate the most crucial parts of the sociological challenge: race, class, gender, and power.  A lot of the Global Sociology review has to do with the later parts of Berger's intellectual course, which I haven't addressed here. I've been primarily interested in where Berger's foundational ideas came from in his own early development.  But I admit that the narrative I've provided here doesn't yet offer a basis for explaining Berger's turn to the right and away from moral and political engagement with the injustices that exist around us.)

Sociology of knowledge: Camic, Gross and Lamont

The sociology of knowledge has received a new burst of energy in the past few years, with quite a bit of encouragement and innovation coming from Science, Technology and Society studies (STS).  (STS overlaps substantially with the SSK research tradition described briefly in an earlier post.)  Charles Camic and Neil Gross have made very substantial contributions in the past few years, with special focus on the knowledge activities associated with the humanities and social sciences.  (Gross's intellectual sociology of Richard Rorty is discussed here.)

So what is going on in this field today?  Camic, Gross, and Lamont, Social Knowledge in the Making, offers a genuinely pathbreaking collection of articles on different aspects of "social knowledge practices".  The editors' introduction to the volume does an excellent job of laying out the issues that current sociology of knowledge needs to confront.  They illustrate very clearly the differences in perspective associated with traditional intellectual history (which they describe as "traditional approach to social knowledge"; TASK), reductionist sociology of knowledge (attempting to link social conditions to specific set of ideas), and the science studies approach, which focuses a great deal of attention on the specific knowledge practices through which a community constructs and furthers a body of knowledge.

The editors make the point that the STS framework (and the SSK approach) is largely focused on the social practices connected with the natural and biological sciences -- laboratories, graduate schools, journals, conferences. And they argue that the fields of knowledge production involved in social knowledge are both important and distinctive.  (They are distinctive for at least three reasons: social knowledge is reflexive, the data must be gathered from subjective participants, and there are powerful interests in play that are pertinent to various formulations of social knowledge.)  So it is timely to pay equally close attention to the practices and institutions through which economics, philosophy, sociology, or Asian Studies frame and construct knowledge.  This volume attempts to give a number of rigorous examples in different areas of the social knowledge domains of that kind of empirical-sociological research.

Here are a few premises of the editors' approach to the problem:

By "social knowledge" we mean, in the first instance, descriptive informaton and analytical statements about the actions, behaviors, subjective states, and capacities of human beings and/or about the properties and processes of the aggregate or collective units -- the groups, networks, markets, organizations, and so on -- where these human agents are situated. (kl 78)

They also include in their definition of social knowledge the ways of knowledge making:

... the technologies and tools of knowledge making -- that is, the epistemic principles, cognitive schemata, theoretical models, conceptual artifacts, technical instruments, methodological procedures, tacit understandings, and material devices by which descriptive and normative statements about the social world are produced, assessed, represented, communicated, and preserved. (kl 78)

Key to their approach is to engage in detailed studies of the social practices associated with knowledge production.  Here is how they define a social practice:

We define "practices" as the ensembles of patterned activities -- the "modes of working and doing," in Amsterdamska's words -- by which human beings confront and structure the situated tasks with which they are engaged.  These activities may be intentional or unintentional, interpersonally cooperative or antagonistic, but they are inherently multifaceted, woven of cognitive, emotional, semiotic, appreciative, normative, and material components, which carry different valences in different contexts. (kl 122)

The goal of this research effort is to do for the social sciences and humanities what the STS/SSK researchers have done for the natural sciences.  This tradition has ...

shifted scholarly attention away from science as a finished product in the temple of human knowledge and toward the study of the multiple multilayered and multisited practices involved during the long hours when future kernels of scientific knowledge are still in the making. (kl 152)

Here is one of the core observations that the editors draw from the research contributions to the volume:

One of these themes is that social knowledge practices are multiplex, composed of many different aspects, elements, and features, which may or may not work in concert. Surveying the broad terrain mapped across the different chapters, we see, for example, the transitory practices of a short-lived research consortium as well as knowledge practices that endure for generations across many disciplines and institutions... (kl 338)

At site after site, heterogeneous social knowledge practices occur in tandem, layered upon one another, looping around and through each another, interweaving and branching, sometimes pulling in the same directions, sometimes in contrary directions. (kl 353)

So how can this research goal be carried out in practice?  Here is how Andrew Abbott pursues some of these questions in his contribution to the volume in an essay that investigates in detail how historians have used libraries in their research:

I have two major aims in this chapter. The first is empirical. I want to recover the practices, communities, and institutions of library researchers and their libraries in the twentieth century. There is at present almost no synthetic writing about this topic, and I aim to fill that gap. This empirical investigation points to a second more theoretical one.  There turns out to be a longstanding debate between librarians and disciplinary scholars over the proper means to create, store, and access the many forms of knowledge found in libraries. By tracing the evolution of this debate, I create a theoretical context for current debates about library research. (kl 581)

One thing I find interesting in reading this work is the absence of the philosophy of science as one of the reflective areas of research through which the knowledge process is examined.  Thomas Kuhn is mentioned as an intellectual founder of the historical-sociological approach to the problem of scientific knowledge; but the vibrant discipline of the philosophy of science is not mentioned by any of the contributors.  This seems to be a lost opportunity, since philosophers too are trying to make sense of the processes, procedures, and norms of the sciences along the way towards an interpretation of philosophical ideas such as truth and objectivity in knowledge.  It would be highly interesting to see a careful study of the development of post-positivist philosophy of science (from Peter Achinstein, Hilary Putnam, and Bas van Fraassen to the present day, let's say), by a sociologist who is willing to take the trouble to carefully examine the doctrines, schools, graduate programs, journals, associations, and dominant ideas that have evolved in the past half century within philosophy.

Tandem with this absence of the philosophy of science is an avoidance of epistemic concepts like "validity," "approximate truth," or "widening understanding of how the social world works."  The impression given by this volume, anyway, is that the task of the sociology of knowledge is solely restricted to examination of the practices and material conditions through which systems of belief about the social world are formed, without a concomitant interest in evaluating the success of the enterprise at establishing some of the facts of how the world works.  This impression is born out in the closing paragraphs of Camic's entry on "Knowledge, Sociology of" in the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Referring essentially to the approach taken by contributors to Social Knowledge in the Making, Camic writes:

This second approach focuses the sociology of knowledge mainly on men and women who specialize in the production of ideas and on the particular social processes by which their ideas emerge and develop—a move that, in effect, transforms the field into a sociology of ideas. This perspective has tended to reject the core assumptions of the older sociology of knowledge, building instead on schol- arship that argues that sociocultural processes are as much internal to the content of ideas as they are external (Bloor 1976, Shapin 1992), that the meanings of ideas are only understandable to an investigator after careful contextual reconstruction (Skinner 1969), and that local, micro-level settings are often the main sites for the development of ideas (Geertz 1983, Whitley 1984). Like the broad-constructionist ap- proach, this narrow-constructionist perspective pre- sently provides a foundation for several lines of empirical research (see Camic and Gross 2000). No forecast can yet be made, however, as to which approach, if either, will rescue the sociology of knowledge from its traditionally marginal position in the discipline of sociology. (8146)

This excerpt too emphasizes the internal practices of the various knowledge communities, rather than the likelihood that the product of knowledge production is valid, veridical, or rationally supportable.

As I found in the earlier post on research communities, it seems that there needs to be more communication and mutual learning between the sociology of science and the philosophy of science. Admittedly the two disciplines have different goals; but in the end, we would like to understand both aspects of the process of knowledge formation in a way that makes coherent sense: the concrete social practices and the cognitive merits of the results.  Otherwise we have no basis for diagnosing what went wrong with Soviet biology and Lysenkoism (depicted in the photo at top).

Merton's sociological imagination

Robert Merton began life as Meyer Schkolnick, son of impoverished Eastern European Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia, and he became one of the most influential American sociologists of his generation.  He is most often associated with a couple of phrases that came to embody common knowledge in the social sciences -- "theories of the middle range," "unforeseen consequences," "focus group," and "standing on the shoulders of giants."  But what, precisely, was his conception of sociology as a science?  What sort of knowledge did he believe that sociology should aspire to?  Did he offer anything like a "paradigm" for sociology as a body of research, theory, and explanation?  And what does his work have to offer to today's generation of sociologists?

Craig Calhoun and others organized a conference at Columbia in 2007 involving a group of pathbreaking sociologists in a variety of sub-disciplines to consider the legacy of Merton, and the result is a highly interesting volume of essays, Robert K. Merton: Sociology of Science and Sociology as Science.  Contributors include Craig Calhoun, Alehandro Portes, Charles Tilly, Robert Sampson, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Viviana Zelizer, Thomas Gieryn, Aaron Panofsky, Alan Sica, Ragnvald, Kallebert, Peter Simonson, Harriet Zuckerman, and Charles Camic, and jointly they consider a very wide range of themes and perspectives from Merton's work.  The volume isn't presented as a festschrift; Gieryn provided just such a collection in 1980 during Merton's life (Science and Social Structure: A Festschrift for Robert K. Merton).  Instead, this volume is conceived as a way of taking the measure of Merton's contributions to sociology as the field continues to develop, and to sound out ways in which Merton's theories and ideas have either flourished or declined in the decades since the most influential ideas were published.  The volume therefore serves very well as an avenue through which to ask the analytical question: what defined Merton's sociological imagination?

In his introduction to the volume, Craig Calhoun presents one important part of Merton's work as being the job of "professionalizing" sociology.  But he also believes that Merton's contributions were substantive and fundamental.  He quotes Merton from "On Sociological Theories of the Middle Range" on the overall purpose of sociology:

Each to his last, and the last of the sociologist is that of lucidly presenting claims to logically interconnected and empirically confirmed propositions about the structure of society and its changes, the behavior of man within that structure and the consequences of that behavior. (14-15)

This is a very focused statement about the nature of sociology; it involves <empirically justified> <theories> about social <structures> and social <behavior>.  It defines a method (empirical, fact-based research), a research product (a body of "logically interconnected statements"), and a subject matter (social structure and behavior).  At the same time, it isn't a wholly informative statement.  What falls under the topic of "social structure"?  Is the theory of organizations a component of a theory of social structure?  How deeply into the intricacies of social psychology should the sociologist go in researching social behavior?  Calhoun makes it clear that he believes that Merton's "philosophy of sociology" becomes more concrete through his efforts to clarify the concepts and theories that sociologists advance.  This is a move from the more abstract to the more concrete -- and very consistent with the idea of "theories of the middle range."  And in fact, much of the value of the volume comes from the efforts made by the contributors to delve more deeply into some specific areas of research and theory formation in which Merton involved himself.

The sociology of science is certainly one of the important areas where Merton made a lasting contribution, and several essays in the volume are devoted to this field.  Thomas Gieryn asks whether Merton formulated a paradigm for the sociology of science -- a good question, since Merton himself was one of the first (along with Thomas Kuhn) to use the word "paradigm" to analyze scientific and intellectual activity.  Gieryn does a very useful job of collating the many things that Merton attributes to his core uses of the concept of paradigm throughout his work from 1968 to 2004 (115):

• assumptions
• problem sets
• problematics
• key concepts
• generalizable concepts
• central concepts
• conceptual apparatus
• logic of procedures procedures of inquiry
• scheme of analysis
• vocabularies 
• postulates
• classification
• ideological imputations
• inference
• substantive findings
• inventory of extant findings
• types of pertinent evidence
• basic propositions
• interpretative schemes
• provisional agreement

Gieryn attempts to codify this list into three areas: "what we know about the social world ... ; how sociologists should study the social world ... ; prototheories that explain in causal fashion why society is the way it is" (115).  (Another way of boiling these elements down would be along these lines: concepts and interpretive schemes; inference and evidence;  broadly accepted substantive findings.)

Gieryn goes on to offer his own account of a paradigm for sociology as a series of oppositions:

1. Science is social and cognitive
2. Science is cooperative and competitive
3. Science is institutionalized and emergent
4. Scientific objects in the world are real and constructed
5. Science is autonomous and embedded
6. Science is universal and local
7. Scientific knowledge is cumulative and ... not (120)

This formulation demonstrates one of the emergent values of a project like this one: inventive sociologists are led to push forward an important question ("What is a paradigm for sociology?") through careful consideration of Merton's work and its strengths and limitations.

An area where Merton is not so well known is in the area of "cultural sociology."  In fact, "culture" seems entirely absent from the short definition quoted above.  Merton is usually read as offering an abstract, structural-functional approach to the social world that pays little attention to cultural factors and meaningful behavior.  Cynthia Fuchs Epstein and Viviana Zelizer take issue with this interpretation, however, in their chapters in the volume.  Epstein puts her perspective in these terms: "Many of Merton's key concepts for the analysis of social life centered on the cultural domain, mated with structural variables" (79).  And she thinks that a key part of Merton's approach to sociological thinking invokes a cultural interpretation of social life:

Learning to think like a sociologist, according to Merton, requires going beyond the individual as the unit of analysis, as is the focus of rational-choice theorists or mainstream psychologists today.  The sociologist is required to consider the cultural web in which individuals are embedded, the social context that causes them to make certain choices and to act in concert with others because they share or are persuaded by social conventions that lodge them in institutional frameworks, which in turn circumscribe their options. (81)

Merton's sociology of science is perhaps a particularly clear example of Epstein's point here; Merton invokes the idea of the ethos of science, the norms and values that govern the choices of scientists, as one of the key sociological facts about science as socially embedded activity.  And this ethos is plainly conveyed to scientists through concrete social arrangements of training and education.

Another area that is less familiar is "sociological semantics" and rhetoric -- basically, Merton's interest in tracing some of the metaphors and concepts that have been important in the ways that people have conceived of history and society.  His book, On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript, traces the phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants" as a metaphor for the advancement of science.  (He traces the lineage past Isaac Newton's usage of the phrase to Bernard of Chartres in the twelfth century.)  Essentially, it is a phrase that captures the idea of cumulation and progress, incorporating and extending the body of knowledge received from prior generations.  Charles Camic notes that Merton often insisted on a sharp delineation between the history of ideas and the sociology of ideas (275).  But Camic argues that Merton actually pursued inquiries that crossed over this line repeatedly in his interest in tracing quotations, concepts, and metaphors through the history of science (278).  His treatment of "serendipity" is a good example; and Camic argues that Merton regarded this kind of analysis as a serious exercise in sociological research.

That Merton himself viewed these writings in light of a larger intellectual project, rather than as occasional amusements, is something he made increasingly explicit, however. (279)

Merton summarized this area of interest under the heading of "Neologisms as Sociological Concepts: History and Analysis" and as a "study in sociological semantics" (279, 280).  Camic quotes Merton as holding that "the frequency and nature of quotations in society [serve] as objects of study in themselves" (283), and he links this kind of inquiry to the study of propaganda and mass persuasion as well.

In short, Merton is a sociologist who repays careful, extensive review, and this volume is a very good start.  It proves the notion that we can not only stand on the shoulders of giants, but can also gain insights that go beyond and beside those predecessors.