Lecture 6 Flashcards
science and society (Dewey)
- we could use physical sciences to control social operations and consequences
- Dewey argued that past stubborn social institutions could be standing in the wayof scientific improvement
Dewey’s quest for certainty
if we want to confront problems we should not distinguish between the theoretical and practical
- the 2 are interconnected in science
- science is our ‘best thinking’ to encounter problems we face
social sciences and social control (Dewey)
Dewey stated that we are doing things wrong in social science because we mimic physical science
- a physical fact is defined by its occurence and relations remain the same
- a social fact refers to human purposes and human consequences
Dewey’s revolutionary claim about social science
- evolutionary process: homo sapiens feel doubts
- the result is problem solving
- find a social technique: ‘if we do this, this happens’
- we do what leads to what we happen to value
- now we are in the business of social planning and control
- now we may work on social science as an instrument
- we need to think about what we want to do with this instrument
relational sociology
a form of sociology concerned with the interactions of people
Emir Bayer’s manifesto
introduces the idea that entities come first and relations among them only subsequently
the key question for sociologists
the choice between substantialism and relationism
trans-action
a dynamic, unfolding process that becomes the primary unit of analysis rather than the constituent elements themselves
- a perspective in which systems of description and naming are employed with aspects and phases of action, without final attribution to ‘elements’ or other presumptively independent entities
central concepts reformulated using relational sociology
- power: power emerges out of the way and patterns in which relationships operate
- equality: inequality comes largely from the solutions that elite and non-elite actors improvise in the face of recurrent organizational problems (challenges centering around control over symbolic, positional, or emotional resources
- freedom: freedom is the outgoing interplay of decision, consequence, and reaction (the concept of freedom might be there for us to cope with the world’s problems
- agency: agency, acting, can only be understood in terms of relations with others
William James
well known pragmatist
the famous problem of philosophy (William James)
relations between ‘relatum’ are unclear
- certain ‘relatum’ can only be described as being about another
- all entities are in a web or relations to other objects
- everything that can serve as the term of a relation can be dissoved into another set of relations, and so on forever
the Deweyan perspective
humans are most likely the result of a (neo-)Darwinist evolutionary process
- humans communities live in an environment that is in a constant (Darwinist) flux
- the scientific method of belief fixation (Pierce) or the scientific stage/method of logical thought (Dewey) is the most effective way to get reliable knowledge-as-action to solve practical problems in society
- relational psychology is likely the most fruitful sociology
