Abstract
In this chapter we point out that the observational approach, because it is blind to doing, obliged Weber to emphasize value relativism and incommensurabilism, thus resulting in an extremely weak scientific standard. Boudon’s work, aimed at extracting all the objectivist potentiality from the observational method in the study of society, even in the field of ethics, provides one of the most instructive expressions of the limitations of the observation view. In fact, Boudon’s cognitive objectivism rests on the idea that, in the very long run, social reality is obliged to converge towards rational solutions if it is to survive: a spontaneity of vision that sets aside the very question represented by the enormous torments (that has been described as the terror of history), that are only heightened and intensified with increasing structural change and that such a spontaneous convergence implies. This merely observational standard obliges Boudon to accept incommensurabilism and even Durkheim’s assimilation of the procedure of science to magic, and to adopt as his own Tocqueville’s resignation in the face of lost opportunities.
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Notes
- 1.
(Boudon 2004a), pp. 7–40.
- 2.
- 3.
(Boudon 2004a), p. 21.
- 4.
Ibidem, p. 23.
- 5.
It may be useful to note that this cognitivism is something different from causal cognition that according R Viale is concerning “perceptions of causality that are not affected by previous experience” but are a priori with respect to this, probably as an effect of the evolution of human mind by selection (Viale 1999).
- 6.
The term observational is here not limited to positivism and neo-positivism; for instance, evolutionary thought also has an observational standard.
- 7.
As we know, the importance Pareto attributes to meta-rational or irrational behaviour pushed him (in his Treatise on general sociology) to propose the notions of residuals and derivations for the analysis of social phenomena.
- 8.
(Russell 1981), p. 36.
- 9.
(Boudon 2004b), p. 58.
- 10.
R Boudon, The poverty of relativism, The Bardwell Press, Oxford and Cambridge, p. 60. Boudon previously writes (p. 53): “In the scientific domain it is possible to say that a proposition or theory is objectively valid from the point at which, as a consequence of a solid chain of argument, it is imperative that, potentially, it will be universally accepted”.
- 11.
(Durkheim 1960), p. 146.
- 12.
(Boudon 2004b), p. 60.
- 13.
(Boudon 2004b), p. 62.
- 14.
(Boudon 2004b), p. 69.
- 15.
See Boudon (2004b), p. 69.
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Fusari, A. (2014). Some Insight on Sociological Thought: Rationality, Relativism and Social Evolution in Boudon-Weber’s Cognitive Method. In: Methodological Misconceptions in the Social Sciences. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8675-1_9
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