Abstract
When one examines the vast literature of the fields of sociology and social psychology after World War II—areas where even the most universal and sophisticated minds could not claim to be general practitioners—one is confronted with several facts which could not be found in the field of more advanced sciences.
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References
G.W. Allport’s study “What Units Shall We Employ” (in: G. Lindzey, ed., Assessment of Human Motives. New York 1964), in itself a contribution reflecting the multidisciplinary context of contemporary psychology, is an interesting psychological counterpart of the troubles of the sociologists.
H. Blumer, Critique of Research in the Social Sciences. New York 1939.
H.W. Dunham, “Sociology: Natural Science or Intellectual Commitment?” In: T. Shibutani, ed., Human Nature and Collective Behaviour. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1970, p. 32.
H. Blumer, Symbolic Interactionism; Perspective and Method. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1969; idem, Foreword to S.T. Bruyn, The Human Perspective in Sociology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1966.
“Les faits, au lieu d’être compris comme les stimulants et les garants d’un effort de construction qui rejoint leur dynamique interne, sont mis au rang d’une grâce péremptoire dont il faut tout attendre, et les idées sont dispensées par principe de toute confrontation avec notre expérience du monde, d’autrui et de nous-même”. (M. Merleau-Ponty, Signes. Paris 1960, p. 124f. Cf. “The Philosopher and Sociology” (1951), in: M. Natanson, ed., Philosophy of the Social Sciences. New York 1963.
A study of the combination of ideas derived from Hegel and Comte and expressed in varying blends in the writings of Marx, Engels, Feuerbach, Renan, Taine, Croce, etc. would be a telling example. Cf. F. Dittmann, Die Geschichtsphilosophie Comtes und Hegels. Leipzig 1914–15.
R.A. Nisbet, “Sociology as an Art Form.” In: M. Stein and A. Vidich, eds., Sociology on Trial. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1963, p. 160.
F.A. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science. Glencoe, Ill. 1952.
J. Bronowski, The Common Sense of Science, 1960; G.W. Remmling, Road to Suspicion, 1967; W. Sypher, Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art, New York 1962. As to common or close trends, similarities, correspondences, equivalencies, and interactions between different scientific disciplines on one hand, and philosophy on the other, compare for example K. Mannheim’s relativist account of the perception of social objects, E. Husserl’s concept of perspective variation (Abschattung),i.e. the fragmentation of our consciousness of one and the same thing, and A. Schutz’s conception of the fields of different relevance of our “life world”.
C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards’ statement from 1923 on the “meaning” of symbols reads like a subjectivistic distortion of reality but it nevertheless reminds us that the term symbol should not be taken for granted: It is 1 a) that to which the user of a symbol actually refers, b) that to which he ought to be referring, c) that to which he believes to be referring, 2 a) that which the interpreter of a symbol refers b) that which he believes himself to be referring, c) that which he believes the user to be referring. (The Meaning of Meaning. New York 1946, pp. 186, 187). The ambiguity of the term meaning (the “meaning” of it) causes, as we shall see later, still more complications. It seems that the complexities of the “mirror game”, “mind reading”, and so on, involved in symbolic interaction—to be referred to in following chapters—start with these ambiguities.
G.J. McCall and J.L. Simmons, Identities and Interactions. New York 1966.
In this sense the efforts of many sociologists and social psychologists to identify their disciplines with “behavioural sciences” seems to be questionable.
A.M. Rocheblave-Spenlé, La notion du rôle en psychologie sociale. Paris 1962; R. Dahrendorf, Homo sociologicus. Köln 1964.
L.L. Whyte, The Unconscious before Freud. London 1967, p. 15.
Ibid., pp. 15, 16.
A.O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being. A study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge, Mass. 1950, pp. 6, 15.
The emphasis upon empiricism is in this context “a provisional acceptance of an ex parte definition of the situation” (R.S. Lynd).
R.S. Lynd, Knowledge for What? Princeton 1946 (1939), pp. 124, 125. Lynd’s criticism of the current approach of “system” sociologists is still pertinent: “We tend to begin by accepting our contemporary institutions as the datum, we go on to view them as a ”system“; this endows the system with its laws; we seek then to discover these laws as the laws of social science” (p. 125).
L.S. Cottrell, Jr., “Some Neglected Problems in Social Psychology”, in: Amer. Soc. Rev. 1950.
E. Beaglehole, “Interpersonal Theory and Social Psychology”. In: P. Mullahy, ed., A Study of Interpersonal Relations. New York 1950, pp. 58, 59.
S.S. Sargent, Discussion. In: O. Klineberg and R. Christian, eds., Perspectives in Social Psychology. New York 1965.
J. Royce, The Spirit of Modern Philosophy. New York 1955.
R.S. Lynd, op. cit., p. 181.
J. Macmurray, The Self as Agent. London 1956.
R.S. Lynd, op. cit., Ch. IV.
C.W. Mills, The Sociological Imagination. New York 1959, Ch. 8.
N.K. Denzin, “The Methodologies of Symbolic Interaction”. In: G.P. Stone and H.A. Farberman, eds., Social Psychology Through Symbolic Interaction. Waltham 1970, pp. 463, 464.
A. Strauss, Mirrors and Masks. Glencoe 1959, p. 173.
Ibid.
S. Beckett, Proust. New York 1931, pp. 3, 4, 8, 56.
M. Stein, “The Poetic Metaphors of Sociology”. In: M. Stein and A. Vidich, eds., op. cit., p. 179.
G.C. Homans, The Human Group. New York 1950, p. 108.
K. Koffka, The Growth of the Mind. London 1965, pp. 165, 166.
W. Waller, “Insight and Scientific Method”, in: Amer. J. Sociol., Nov. 1934.
“The difference between a good novel and the ordinary case study is that the novel describes false or non-existing phenomena to communicate true insight, while the case study conceptualizes true phenomena to communicate no insight” (ibid., p. 296).
R.S. Lynd, op. cit., p. 179.
H. Read, Education Through Art. London 1958.
L. Lowenthal, Literature and the Image of Man. Boston 1963, p. X.
R.A. Nisbet, op. cit., p. 157.
H. Nash, “The Role of Metaphor in Psychological Theory”, in: Behavioral Science 1963/8, p. 340.
H. D. Duncan, Language and Literature in Society. New York 1961, p. 72.
H.W. Dunham, op. cit., p. 33.
K. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism. London 1957. Our emphasis.
Ibid., pp. 186 ff.
H. Blumer, “What is Wrong with Social Theory”, in: Amer. Sociol. Rev. 1954; idem, Symbolic Interactionism, pp. 140, 141.
A third type of theory is termed “policy” theory and its task is to analyse a given social situation, or social structure, or social action as a basic for policy action. “The elements of its analysis and their relations have a nature given by the concrete situation and not by the methods or abstractions of empirical science”.
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Baumann, B. (1975). Multidisciplinary Context of Sociology and Social Psychology. In: Imaginative Participation. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-4871-1_1
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