#29 Alexander introduces the Theoretical Logic in Sociology
Two polemics and some arguments for a 4-volume work
Jeffrey Alexander wrote:
Preface to Volumes 2-4: Theoretical Thought and Its Vicissitudes, The Achievements and Limitations of Classical Sociology
In the first three volumes of this work I made certain statements about the nature of science and the relationship of its components, the status of contemporary theoretical debate in sociology; the qualities of good theorizing, and the role of interpretive readings in social-scientific theory. I also conducted, from the perspective of these initial questions and arguments, an investigation into the theoretical logic that informed the work of sociology’s classical founders: Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. I hope, of course, that readers of the present volume will have read its predecessors. As the finale of a long work, this concluding volume, ineluctably, builds upon the earlier ones, particularly since I seek to demonstrate that the thought of the present subject — Talcott Parsons — can be understood only in the context of dialogue with Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. Nonetheless, many readers of this volume will not, in fact, have read the preceding works, and for this reason I will try to offer here an overview which can function, if even in a limited way, as a framework within which to place the present volume. For those familiar with the earlier volumes, this discussion is unnecessary, but they may still find it a helpful review of the status and implications of my general argument.
In volume 1, I conducted two simultaneous polemics. First, I argued against the positivist persuasion in contemporary understandings of science, evident not only among philosophers and sociologists of science but among its practitioners as well. The crucial proposition of the positivist persuasion, I argued, is that factual statements can be ontologically separated from nonfactual statements or generalizations. From this central tenet, the other components of the positivist persuasion follow: the notions that philosophical or metaphysical issues play no essential part in a true empirical science, that theoretical disputes must be decided by reference to crucial empirical experiments alone, that methodological techniques of verification or falsification are of critical and ultimate importance. In opposition to these positivist tenets, I suggested that general as well as specific thinking is crucial to science, and I defined this "theoretical" as contrasted to "methodological" or "empirical" logic as the concern with the effects of more general assumptions on more specific formulations. Throughout these volumes, the focus is upon this more general concern with theoretical logic.
My second polemic was directed against theoretical arguments that have occurred within the antipositivist framework itself. I argued that recent debates in sociological theory have sought to reduce theoretical argument to one or another particular set of nonempirical commitments. Theoretical empiricism has, for example, sought to reduce sociological theory to assumptions about methodology, conflict theory to assumptions about the relative equilibrium of the empirical world at a specific time, antifunctionalist critique to assumptions about the nature of scientific models, and ideological criticism-practicising a "strong program" in the sociology of knowledge-to the political components of a theorist's perspective.
I have proposed, to the contrary, that science be conceived as a multilayered continuum, one that stretches from the most general, metaphysically oriented presuppositions to more specific ideological assumptions and models, to still more empirical assumptions and methodological commitments, and finally to empirically related propositions and "facts." Each of these levels, I insist, has relative autonomy vis-a-vis other kinds of scientific commitments, although each is powerfully interrelated to others at the same time. It is the task of theoretical logic in sociology to explicate what each of these commitments entails and how they are interrelated. Only with such a differentiated understanding of science, moreover, can the dichotomy of idealist versus positivist, or materialist, understandings of science be resolved, for with this understanding it becomes clear that every scientific statement is the product of the interaction between pressures from the empirical and the metaphysical environments …
… As part of this second polemic I stressed a further point: not only have recent theoretical arguments been reductionistic, or conflationary, but taken together they have usually ignored the most generalized elements of social-scientific argument. I called these elements "presuppositions" and defined them as the assumptions any social scientist makes about the nature of human action and how it is aggregated into patterned arrangements.
These presuppositional assumptions address the problems of action and order. First — and here I must unfortunately simplify complex issues which were treated earlier at some length — action can be defined either in an instrumental, rationalizing way or in a manner that pays more attention to nonrational, normative, or affective components. The former takes the materialist path, the latter the idealist, although there is also, of course, the possibility for a more integrated and synthetic, or multidimensional, position. Second, theory must also adopt an orientation to order. Are social arrangements the results of individual negotiation or do they present themselves as collective structures that have sui generis, or emergent, status? Individualistic approaches often reveal important elements of empirical interaction, but they ignore the invisible parameters within which such action takes place, parameters which, indeed, often inform the substance of action itself. If one takes the collective course, on the other hand, action remains vitally important, for assumptions about the nature of action will determine how such collective order will be described. In line with the idealist approach to action, collective order has often been given a normative hue. This position has the advantage of allowing collective structures to be combined with the voluntary agency of individuals, for normative order rests upon internal, subjective commitments. Yet taken by itself, this approach exaggerates the responsiveness of the collectivity to subjective concerns. But if action is assumed, in the name of greater realism, to be instrumentalizing and rational, collective structure will be described as external and material; if motives are always calculating and efficient, action will be completely predictable on the basis of external pressure alone. Subjectivity and the concern with motive drop out: order is then viewed in a thoroughly deterministic way. These two solutions to the problem of collective order form the traditions of sociological idealism and sociological materialism, traditions that must be sharply separated from idealism and materialism in a purely epistemological sense. Of course, once again, there remains the theoretical possibility that more synthetic and multidimensional understandings of collective order may be achieved.
It is within the contexts of these various polemics that I introduced certain technical arguments which might at first glance elude readers of the present volume alone. These are: (1) the dangers of "conflation" in scientific argument, (2) the importance of multidimensional thought at the most general presuppositional level, (3) the dangers of "reduction" within this presuppositional level itself. Within the context of the preceding summary, however, these technical points should now be more accessible. (1) Conflationary arguments attempt to make each of the components of the scientific continuum primarily dependent on one particular differentiated commitment. Thus, "conflict sociology" is conflationary, as are so many of the arguments for "critical sociology" and the arguments for or against "functionalist sociology" … (2) Within the presuppositional level — the most general and ramifying level of scientific reasoning — I insist on the theoretical power of multidimensional thinking over either its idealist or materialist counterparts. Critical benefits accrue to both forms of one-dimensional thought, but there are also debilitating weaknesses which make each, taken by itself, theoretically unacceptable. (3) I suggest that one-dimensional thinking has often been camouflaged by a form of reductionism within the presuppositional level itself: the reduction of the problem of action to the problem of order. Sociological idealists and materialists often argue — in fact, almost invariably — that a collective rather than individualistic approach can be achieved only if action is perceived in an instrumentalist or normative way. This reduction is false. The questions of action and order are themselves relatively autonomous, although once decided they profoundly affect one another. Normative and instrumental understandings of action can both be collectivist, and, conversely, they can both inform individualistic thought.
I made other arguments in volume 1. Most importantly, I suggested that nonpositivistic thought need not be relativistic, that it can attain its own kind of objectivity. I also argued, in the Prolegomena to volume 2, for the critical importance in social-scientific argument of the interpretation and reinterpretation of classical work. "Readings" of the work of dead theorists, or of completed and past theoretical statements, is in the nonconsensual world of social science a fundamental means-though, of course, not the only one-of establishing the validity of certain general orientations.
These assertions, which for polemic and clarity's sake were put as sharply as possible and here are being reproduced in an unforgivably foreshortened way, may have seemed tendentious. I hope that the intervening discussions, in volumes 2 and 3, have demonstrated that they are not. "Philosophical" and "humanistic" issues do seem to matter even for the most distinguished exercises in social science: every empirical fact, every propositional statement, is, after all, informed though not completely determined by much more generalized concerns. Two scientists might observe the same revolutionary movement, and even agree that it was a revolutionary movement, but they would explain it differently if they disagreed about the nature of human action and how such individual actions are aggregated to form social order. Other kinds of general concerns, of course, also affect their explanations-ideological evaluations, models of social system parts, methodological philosophies and specific techniques, expectations about empirical equilibrium and disorder. I hope to have succeeded in demonstrating, however, that while each of these different levels comes into play, while each is relatively autonomous and of possibly determinate influence in any specific situation, it is the most general level of presuppositional commitment that is the most ramifying and decisive for the analytic structuring of empirical life. It is decisions made on this level that cause the most critical shifts in social-scientific work; the power or weakness of presuppositional understanding-more than any other scientific commitment-places the blinders on social theory or offers the resources for its critical achievements.
These conclusions summarize my detailed examination of the scientific thinking of the founders of modern sociology. I hope to have demonstrated, in the first place, that this thinking is not of only antiquarian concern. It should be clear that the empirical matter they dealt with, the propositions they offered, and the models they built are still the life and stuff of contemporary sociology. These classical figures grappled with problems which continue to obsess their students and followers, whose writings — in more or less direct lineages — form the major bulk of contemporary sociology. It would not be difficult, indeed, to demonstrate from any advanced sociology text that the most current debates on the most specific subjects are still structured by — among other factors — the presuppositional arguments that were first articulated and sociologically specified by Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. In fact, in a casual and informal way, I made the beginnings of such a demonstration in volumes 2 and 3, for in the course of my analyses I discussed, perforce, fundamental issues in almost every specialized field of sociological thought: collective behavior and law; social change and science; education and religion; organization and stratification; social psychology and deviance; ethnicity and social change; urban sociology and modernization; socialization and politics; the sociology of the family, of work, and of economic life …
… This analysis has revealed, above all, that while it is relatively easy to express epistemological multidimensionality; it is much more difficult to translate this commitment into a sociological form. Multidimensional thought is necessarily complex; the temptation to simplify; to slip back into linear thinking, is correspondingly great. The temptation appears in a variety of disguises. Reductionist theory seems tempting for reasons of clarity and for reasons of ideology, because of intra- and interdisciplinary conflicts, because of the persistent and nagging error of conflation which seems to demand that one or another presuppositional position necessarily accompany a commitment at another level of the scientific continuum. And in the end, onedimensional thought is always conducted in the name of empirical reality itself, for the effect of each of these more generalized pressures is to make the scientist "see" in a one-dimensional way. Scientific integrity, then, seems often to demand the negation of multidimensional thought. But this demand can never be legitimate; no matter what the initial appearance, our understanding of empirical reality is eventually impoverished if a vital dimension of social life is blocked from our theoretical consciousness. The failure to achieve multidimensionality, however, has its most persistent cause in the difficulties and confusions of general theoretical logic itself, and it is to this problem that I have really devoted these volumes. Each of the classical theorists committed himself to a collective understanding of social order, yet the uncertainty of his conception of action made this social order difficult to define.
Jeffrey C. Alexander, Theoretical Logic in Sociology, Volume Four: The modern reconstruction of classical thought, Talcott Parsons, University of California Press 1983 [xvii-xxii]