I am an undergrad student in social science with a focus on political science and sociology, so I of all people should know that to Khun the social sciences could not have paradigms. They were not eligible becuase they didn't have any coherent paradigm to shift from. And yet Kuhn wrote that "Successive transition from one paradigm to another via revolution is the usual developmental pattern of mature science." So wasn't sociology a mature science? Many of the big theories of sociology have a tendency of trying to bite over the whole society at once, and often falls to ad hoc adding new pieces of puzzle to fite the remaining peaces. Kategorized these theories have a tendency to fall into four categories, each occupying a space each on a coordinate system labeled "Micro- macro" in the Y- axis, and "actor - structure" on the other.
In these four boxes we find conflict theory (featuring Marx), funktionalism (Parsons), individualism (Durkheim and Weber), and contextualism (Bourdieu and Bernstein). Even with this oversimplification it quickly becomes clear that socilogy is in somewhat of a cricis. When working you have to choose which words you are going to use to describe a phenomena, and stick to those words only, because if you start blending together the views there may be logical missteps your relatively tiny brain can't even begin to fathom. Research done within one part of the science may not be immediately tranferable to other parts. That's why, when I'm going to do reseach this year for my bachelors I'm more inclined to study the empirical results of a study, rather than trying to copy the design.
Yes; I realize I talk with very little experience here, but being a young student and already noticing this great juncture all social scientists have to take even before choosing a research design, isn't this a clue that something is fundamentally wrong?
Oh and yes; don't even try to put forth that overly positive answer "Isn't it great that you have so many viewpoints to your problem?" - No! Sure, it's great to have many different angles to a problem, but not when the reson you fall on them is because the theory you are currently working in doesn't feature any meaningful theory about it. And I'm still only talking about the theory within the current field, not problematicing what the field is about in general - but it is here I believe the problem of particularily sociology and antropology lie today. They make an aritficial boundary which they are reluctant to cross.
The field of sociology consist of everything in a society starting with the appearance and speech of a person to the sidewalks and bars themselves. We would define it as a study of the interaction between humans, and the systems in which they happen. This "definition" doesn't actually sound so bad. It is in fact very wide. But the problem is that sociology has not taken the consequences of it's own definition but tried with all it's might to stay within the discourse of those that came before. Sociology does not try to explain why culture came to be, neither does it concern itself with the properties in the brain when it comes to choice or for that matter try to predict the long term concequences of the social interaction in the information society. They respectively push this over to the biologists, neuroscientists and futureologists. The irony in this is that for all three sociology has tried to give philosophical answers, while the trend of the modern philosopher has been to try to marry the disciplines to itself and to one another. (good title for future post: The polygamists of science)
As a consequence of this the best definition of culture (of which there are more than 700) I read was actually proposed by an anthropologist working with an environmental scientist trying to explain just why we are they way we are:
"Culture is information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation, and other forms of social transmission" (Boyd and Richerson 2005"
The definition avoids trying to sum up the norms and cultural artifacts found within it, but takes a step back and really just sums it all up: information shared. It is without a shadow of a doubt a sociological definition. It falls o so neat within those boundaries we set for our selves - but it manages to capture society at its best and words, percicey because it deals not with society as a whole, but as a sum of its parts. To me it is innexusable that social scientist learn so litte about how the brain works, and how we come to our choices as we have come to understand in the natural sciences, because this is what the social sciences are trying to account for! Leaving it off to the psychologits it missing the point entirely, because they have enough trying to account for what these results mean for the interaction within the brain, and between the brain and the outer world. From there it is up to the antropologists and sociologists to take that knowledge, and tell us what consequences it will have in the real world.
So why, after bluntly striking the notion of paradigms in social sciences down in the firsts paragraphs do I want to talk about this shift? Because I sincerely believe that the marrying of the natural sciences to the more philosophically oriented social sciences at the hip, will result in a truer platform from which our research will generate lasting and generalizable theories. I myself is taking up the torch, and starting with a new class this year called "Philosophical neuroscience", and I hope the institute of sociology will follow suit VERY SOON!
