Abstract
In the last four chapters we have argued that explanation of the social should be impartial and symmetrical-that an approach should be adopted which explains the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ in the same way. Advocacy of non-prescriptive and relativistic approaches to social analysis has, however, always been common in so called ‘verstehende sociology’ — that part of the discipline that takes people’s meanings seriously. We touched upon the reason for this in our discussion of Lévy Bruhl’s work: taking people’s meanings seriously can be interpreted as trying to display the internal rationality of their actions and beliefs, no matter how strange these may appear to be at first sight.
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Endnotes
Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1958).
Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method (Free Press, New York, 1964); and in particular, Emile Durkheim, Suicide (Free Press, New York, 1951).
Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method (Free Press, New York, 1964); and in particular, Emile Durkheim, Suicide (Free Press, New York, 1951).
Max Weber, Economy and Society, vol. 1, ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich (ed.) (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1978), Ch. 1, ‘Basic Sociological Terms’.
It might be argued that at the extreme the similarities and differences attended to in the case of social institutions are entirely dependent upon — indeed are constituted by — social cues, whereas they exist independently of social cues for natural kinds. For a discussion of this possibility see Barry Barnes, ‘Social Life as Bootstrapped Induction’, mimeo, (Science Studies Unit, University of Edinburgh, 1982).
See J. D. Douglas, The Social Meanings of Suicide (Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1967).
J. Maxwell Atkinson, Discovering Suicide: Studies in the Social Organisation of Sudden Death (Macmillan, London, 1978).
R. Bulmer, ‘Why the Cassowary is not a Bird’ pp. 167–93 in Mary Douglas (ed.), Rules and Meanings (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973).
D. Lawrence Wieder, ‘Telling the Code’ pp. 144–72 in Roy Turner (ed.), Ethnomethodology (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1974). This is a particularly interesting study of network acquisition.
Steven Shapin, ‘Phrenological Knowledge and the Social Structure of Early Nineteenth Century Edinburgh’, Annals of Science, 32 (1975) pp. 219–43.
Our discussion of cause is akin, but not identical, to that of Barnes. Barry Barnes, Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1974) pp. 71–8.
Trevor J. Pinch, ‘The Sun Set: the Presentation of Certainty in Scientific Life’, Social Studies of Science, 11, (1981) pp. 131–58.
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© 1984 John Law and Peter Lodge
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Law, J., Lodge, P. (1984). The Problem of Verstehen . In: Science for Social Scientists. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17536-9_22
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17536-9_22
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