社会科学作为科学，可能吗？吕炳强评温奇评J.S.密尔

作者：吕炳强

按语：高行云

吕炳强，《社会学的科学课题》（英文版），香港中文大学哲学系硕士班讲义稿

——今后会逐章地公开，并附上中文按语，便于理解。原文发布，已获吕老师授权。

The British philosopher Peter Winch (1926-1997) published in 1958 The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy【注1】. It is a book of a style and language which not every reader will be used to, but it is well immersed in British philosophy, or to be more exact, well conversant in topics of interest to the British philosophical circle at that time.

The ordinary language philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) in Philosophical Investigations is Winch’s main source of inspirations—both philosophical and sociological. It can be said to be Wittgenstein’s turn from logico-language in his early period to socio-language in his late period【注2】. It is not difficult to see that such a turn is Wittgenstein’s philosophical descent from the heaven of logic to the earth of society, and is hence necessarily pregnant with insights for social science. But insights in pregnancy are by nature blurry and rudimentary, and those picked up by Winch are no exceptions. The Idea of a Social Science is therefore both interesting and annoying at the same time to the reader, and this is perhaps the reason that keeps it on the reading list of philosophy of social science after five decades since its publication.

In the second edition published in 1990, Winch wrote a preface to it but did not revise the text. In this preface, he points out that the central core of his argument in The Idea of a Social Science is stated in Chapter III, Sections 5 “The Investigation of Regularities” and 6 “Understanding Social Institutions”【注3】. We shall follow his guideline and read these two sections in detail. He is surely not the first philosopher to propose an idea of social science. He took the idea of moral sciences (that is, social science) proposed by J. S. Mill (1806-1873) as a predecessor, considered it defective, and proposed his own idea of social science. My task in this lecture is to make observations on his idea, from my own vantage point which was probably not available to him. Needless to say, we are focusing on one single idea, and Winch’s other ideas, which may be equally important as or even more important than the one we are going to discuss, are left out.

 2  Mill’s idea

Since Winch took Mill’s idea of social science as a defective predecessor, we shall go through Chapter III, Section 1 “J. S. Mill’s “Logic of Moral Sciences”” first. Winch explains his choice of Mill as follows:

I want … to consider some of the difficulties which arise if we try to base our understanding of societies on the methods of natural science. I start with John Stuart Mill for two reasons: first, because Mill states naively a position which underlies the pronouncements of a large proportion of contemporary social scientists, even if they do not always make it explicit; second, because some rather more sophisticated interpretations of the social studies as science … can be best understood as attempts to remedy some of the more obvious defects in Mill’s position【注4】. 

He continues to describe Mill’s idea:

Mill, like many of our own contemporaries, regarded the state of the ‘moral sciences’ as a ‘blot on the face of science’. The way to remove this was to generalize the methods used in those subjects ‘on which the results obtained have finally received the unanimous assent of all who have attended the proof’. … For this reason he regarded the philosophy of the social studies as just a branch of the philosophy of science. ‘The methods of investigation applicable to moral and social science must have been already described, if I have succeeded in enumerating and characterizing those of science in general.’ … This implies that … Mill does not really believe that there is a ‘logic of the moral sciences’. The logic has to be done is to elucidate certain difficulties arising in its application to the peculiar subject-matter studied in the moral sciences.

That is the task to which the main part of Mill’s discussion is addressed. I want here to examine rather the validity of the thesis which his discussion takes for granted. To understand it we need to refer to Mill’s conception of scientific investigation generally, which is based on Hume’s ideas about the nature of causation. … To say that A is the cause of B is not to assert the existence of any intelligible (or mysterious) nexus between A and B, but to say that the temporal succession of A and B is an instance of a generalization to the effect that events like A are always found in our experience to be followed by events like B.

If scientific investigation consists in establishing causal sequences, then it seems to follow that we may have a scientific investigation of any subject-matter about which it is possible to establish generalizations. Indeed, Mill goes further: ‘Any facts are fitted, in themselves, to be a subject of science, which follow one another according to constant laws; although these laws may not have been discovered, nor even be discoverable by our existing resources’. … That is, there may be science wherever there are uniformities; and there may be uniformities even where we have not yet discovered them and are not in a position to discover them and formulate them in generalizations.

…

Mill supposes that the ‘science of human nature’ could at least be developed to the level of Tidology [the theory of the tides—mine]. Owing to the complexity of the variables we may be unable to do more than make statistical generalizations about the probable outcome of social situations. ‘The agencies [that is, powers—mine] which determine human character are so numerous and diversified … that in the aggregate they are never in two cases exact similar.” Nevertheless,

an approximate generalization is, in social inquiries, for most practical purposes equivalent to an exact one; that which is only probable where asserted of individual human beings indiscriminately selected, being certain when affirmed of the character and collective conduct of masses. …

Just as the irregularity of the tides as between different places on the globe does not mean that there are no regular laws governing them, so in the case of human behavior. Individual divergences are to be explained by the operation of laws on highly diversified individual situations. So broad statistical generalizations are not ultimately enough: they must be ‘connected deductively with the laws of nature from which they result’. These ultimate laws of nature are the ‘Laws of Mind’ …【注5】

First, after a century and a half, our understanding of societies nowadays still relies heavily on the methods of natural sciences, especially statistical methods. Mill made his remarks on the use of statistics in social sciences well before the invention of the first true test of hypothesis, that is, the Chi-square test, in 1900 by Sir Karl Pearson (1857-1936). Statistical methods are now far more sophisticated, especially in the modeling methods. It makes the reliance on statistical methods quite respectable in both natural and social scientific communities. One consequence is that since statistical methods are used social sciences can retain detection of regularities or discovery of uniformities their goal, quite contrary to Winch’s view.

Another improvement is a ready acceptance of speculative philosophies such as ontology and hermeneutics into social sciences, at least in sociology, since the fifties or sixties of the last century. The philosophies of Alfred Schutz (1899-1959), Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) and Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) are examples. Winch argues in The Idea of a Social Science that metaphysics and epistemology—ontology and hermeneutics can be considered either as their brothers or as their neighbours—should be accepted into social science【注6】. In a sense, his wish is now fulfilled. The two improvements—this one in philosophy, and the other one in statistics—drastically reduced the argumentative force of Winch’s objection to Mill.

On the other hand, insistence on the connection between explanation and causality is probably unnecessary, since even in the scientific project of sociology explanation in the strict sense is quite impossible to achieve. If there is an explanation, it will most probably be close to an interpretation; in other words, if there is an epistemology, it will most probably be used as a hermeneutics. In my usage, epistemology concerns explanation and hermeneutics interpretation. Causality does not occupy a significant place in hermeneutics.

My view is that time should be part and parcel of the fundamental ontology of sociology, a point I have explained in my lectures last Fall and earlier elsewhere【注8】. The actor deploys more than one time structure to visualize different social realities in his subjective experience. Most of such time structures are non-linear. The matter is quite involved, I shall explain it in the concluding lectures【注9】.

Fourth, as far as sociology is concerned, Mill is too arrogant and too modest to say that “an approximate generalization is, in social inquiries, for most practical purposes equivalent to an exact one”. In fact, the scientific project of sociology has little to do with practical purposes, but its speculative counterpart has everything to do with them. Speculations about the social world enter into the subjective experience of the actor almost without any hindrance—a fact that seems strange but is true—and that makes them readily useable to him. Knowledge from the scientific project often comes too incomplete and too late for practical purposes; for this reason, it is more academic than even theoretical and experimental physics. I shall discuss this peculiarity of sociology if the opportunity arises.

Fifth, in the case of the scientific project of sociology, the necessity to relate it to psychology (“Laws of Mind”) is probably not as urgent as Mill thought because of various reasons. One reason is that the sociological theorist is concerned with phenomena of the collectivity; and he will not venture into those of the individual, even though he may have to collect data from individuals.   

 3  Winch’s idea

We shall begin our discussion on Winch’s idea with the following quotation:

A follower of Mill might concede that explanations of human behavior must appeal not to causal generalizations about the individual’s reaction to his environment but to our knowledge of the institutions and ways of life which give his acts their meaning. But he might argue that this does not damage the fundamentals of Mill’s thesis, since understanding social institutions is still a matter of grasping empirical generalizations which are logically on a footing with those of natural science. For an institution is, after all, a certain kind of uniformity, and a uniformity can only be grasped in a generalization. I shall now examine this argument.

A regularity or uniformity is the constant recurrence of the same kind of event on the same kind of occasion; hence statements of uniformities presuppose judgements of identity. But this takes us right back to the argument … according to which criteria of identity are necessarily relative to some rule: with the corollary that two events which count as qualitatively similar from the point of view of one rule would count as different from the point of view of another. So to investigate the type of regularity studied in a given kind of enquiry is to examine the nature of the rule according to which judgements of identity are made in that enquiry. Such judgements are intelligible only relatively to a give mode of human behavior, governed by its own rules. In a physical science the relevant rules are those governing the procedures of investigators in the science in question. … To understand what was going on in … [an] experiment … [one] would have to learn the nature of what … physicists do; and this would include learning the criteria according to which they make judgements of identity.

Those rules, like all others, rest on a social context of common activity. So to understand the activities of an individual scientific investigator we must take account of two sets of relations: first, his relation to the phenomena which he investigates; second, his relation to the sense of saying that he is ‘detecting regularities’ or ‘discovering uniformities’; but writers on scientific ‘methodology’ too often concentrate on the first and overlook the importance of the second. …

… The phenomena being investigated present themselves to the scientist as an object of study; he observes them and notices certain facts about them. But to say of a man that he does this presupposes that he already has a mode of communication in the use of which rules are already being observed. For to notice something is to identify relevant characteristics, which means that the noticer must have some concept of such characteristics; this is possible only if he is able to use some symbol according to a rule which makes it refer to those characteristics. So we come back to his relation to his fellow-scientists, in which context alone he can be spoken of as following the same rule. … 

In the course of his investigation the scientist applies and develops the concepts germane to his particular field of study. This application and modification are ‘influenced’ both by the phenomena to which they are applied and also by the fellow-workers in participation with whom they are applied. But the two kinds of ‘influence’ are different. Whereas it is on the basis of his observation of the phenomena (in the course of his experiments) that he develops his concepts as he does, he is able to do this only in virtue of his participation in an established form of activity with his fellow-scientists. When I speak of ‘participation’ here I do not necessarily imply any direct physical conjunction or even any direct communication between fellow-participants. What is important is that they are all taking part in the same general kind of activity, which they have all learned in similar ways; that they are, therefore, capable of communicating with each other about what they are doing; that what any one of them is doing is in principle intelligible to the others【注10】.

Right in the first sentence of the quotation, Winch distinguishes two “explanations of human behavior”: one appeals “to causal generalizations about the individual’s reaction to his environment,” and the other “to our knowledge of the institutions and ways of life which give his acts their meaning”. In my view, both explanations are present in the scientific project of sociology. As Winch knows, the latter line is the one taken by Max Weber (1860-1920)【注11】. In this sense, he is not proposing something new.

He used the sociological concept “social institution” as an exemplar in his argument. He agrees with Mill that “an institution is a certain kind of uniformity”, but he argues that that a uniformity (“the constant recurrence of the same kind of event on the same kind of occasion”) can be “grasped in a generalization” presupposes “judgement of identity”, and “criteria of identity are necessarily relative to some rule”, but there are more than one rule, and hence “two events which count as qualitatively similar from the point of view of one rule would count as different from that of another”. The concept “rule” was borrowed from ordinary language philosophy; it is the rule of the language-game. And, we must remember, in the language-game there is human agency; I shall come back to this point shortly.

From that point onwards, Winch makes a sociological turn, and suggests the necessity of “a social context of common activity” that transmits, teaches, fosters, encourages and perhaps reinforces some particular rule. That context he called “a scientist’s relation to his fellow-scientists”, which in the 16^th century was called “invisible college” or “philosophical college”【注12】, and since the fifties or sixties of the last century it has been studied as a branch of sociology, called “sociology of science”, by Robert Merton (1910-2003), Bernard Barber (1938-1988) and other sociologists【注13】. 

Important as the “invisible college” may be, “a scientist’s relation to his fellow-scientists” implies, I think more significantly, the tradition of science, which Winch has in fact hinted at: “When I speak of ‘participation’ here I do not necessarily imply any direct physical conjunction or even any direct communication between fellow-participants.” Obviously, as an invisible college stretches in time, it gives rise to a tradition. A scientist’s relation to the tradition he belongs to is far more significant than his living relation to his fellow-scientists—epistemologically and/or hermeneutically.

Gadamer has the deepest insight into the matter:

Hermeneutical experience is concerned with tradition. This is what is to be experienced. But tradition is not simply a process that experience teaches us to know and govern; it is language—i.e., it expresses itself like a Thou. A Thou is not an object; it relates itself to us. It would be wrong to think that this means that what is experienced in tradition is to be taken as the opinion of another person, a Thou. Rather, I maintain that the understanding of tradition does not take the traditionary text as an expression of another person’s life, but as meaning that is detached from the person who means it, from an I or a Thou. Still, the relationship to the Thou and the meaning of experience implicit in that relation must be capable of teaching us something about hermeneutical experience. For tradition is a genuine partner in dialogue, and we belong to it, as does the I with a Thou【注14】.

Each scientist is a subjectivity, and the relations between all scientists form an ongoing intersubjectivity, or to be more exact, an ongoing network of subjectivities in the media of communication and exchange, which is in fact a social process according to George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) in his Mind, Self, and Society. Tradition in this case is the otherness that “governs” the social process of science. It is in fact this otherness (tradition) that transmits, teaches, fosters, encourages and perhaps reinforces some particular rule within the intersubjectivity (the relations between fellow-scientists).

In my lectures last Fall on “The Philosopher and Sociology” and earlier elsewhere【注15】, I have explained that otherness is an impersonal other. A “social context of common activity” is often nothing but a social process “governed” by an otherness that can be found in economy, politics, law, administration, religion or tradition【注16】. As far as science is concerned, its tradition is the dominant, if not the only, otherness pertaining to it as a social process.

Winch continues:

Mill’s view is that understanding a social institution consists in observing regularities in the behavior of its participants and expressing these regularities in the form of generalizations. Now if the position of the sociological investigator (in a broad sense) can be regarded as comparable, in its main logical outlines, with that of the natural scientist, the following must be the case. The concepts and criteria according to which the sociologist judges that, in two situations, the same thing has happened, or the same action performed, must be understood in relation to the rules governing sociological investigation. But here we run against a difficulty: for whereas in the case of the natural scientist we have to deal with only one set of rules, namely those governing the scientist’s investigation itself, here what the sociologist is studying, as well as his study of it, is a human activity and is therefore carried on according to rules. And it is these rules, rather than those which govern the sociologist’s investigation, which specify what is to count as ‘doing the same kind of thing’ in relation to that kind of activity.

An example may make this clearer. Consider the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican (the tax collector—mine) (Luke, 18, 9). Was the Pharisee who said ‘God, I thank Thee that I am not as other men are’ doing the same kind of thing as the Publican who prayed ‘God, be merciful unto me a sinner’?【注17】 To answer this one would have to start by considering what is involved in the idea of prayer; and that is a religious question. In other words, the appropriate criteria for deciding whether the actions of these two men were of the same kind or not belong to religion itself. Thus the sociologist of religion will be confronted with an answer to the question: Do these two acts belong to the same kind of activity?; and this answer is given according to criteria which are not taken from sociology, but from religion itself.

But if the judgements of identity—and hence the generalizations—of the sociologist of religion rest on criteria taken from religion, then his relation to the performers of religious activity cannot be just that of observer to observed. It must rather be analogous to the participation of the natural scientist with his fellow-workers in the activities of scientific investigation. Put the point generally, even if it is legitimate to speak of one’s understanding of a mode of social activity as consisting in a knowledge of regularities, the nature of this knowledge must be very different from the nature of knowledge of physical regularities. …【注18】

What epistemological position can the sociologist take regarding the last sentence of the quotation? It depends on whether he is a social theorist or a sociological theorist. I have made a distinction in my lectures last Fall, as follows: Social theories are speculations about the social world. The few among them that are amenable to positivistic investigation under certain specific conditions are called sociological theories. Social theories and sociological theories belong respectively to the speculative and scientific projects of sociology.

The sociologist Winch has in mind is the sociological theorist. By definition, he must investigate the object of study positivistically, that is, he is obliged to set up hypotheses about the social world (Winch: “social institution”) and then test them with empirical data (in the broad sense) available to him. He is the sociological counterpart of the experimental physicist, and perhaps it is more appropriate to call him the experimental sociologist. As a result, he is indeed working hard to “detect regularities” or “discover uniformities” in the positivistic manner like the experimental physicist, and the knowledge he gains cannot be very different in nature—although definitely very different in degree of precision—from that the experimental physicist does. Needless to say, the knowledge gained by the social theorist is very different in nature from that gained by the sociological theorist.

Thus understood, in face with Winch’s view the sociological theorist needs not change himself into a social theorist, but he must find out ways and means to circumvent the difficulties raised by Winch.

First of all, the sociological theorist has no reason not to accept Winch’s view that in addition to the “rules governing sociological investigation”, “what the sociologist [in this case, the experimental sociologist] is studying … is a human activity and is therefore carried on according to rules.” He is faced with two sets of rules (remember: they are prototypically rules of the language-game), one governing his study while the other his object of study. The experimental physicist is more fortunate since the physical object he studies, that is, his object of study, does not speak a language! It plays no language-game, and hence he has no rules to learn in this regard.

I made a joke about physics at a seminar which perhaps tells the same truth in a way closer to sociology. I said, “What makes the social world unfathomable is not that sociology is backward, although backward as it is. Rather, it has to deal with agents, that is, autonomous actors, such as the dissenters and the rebels. If there were physical particles which dissented like social dissenters and rebel like political rebels do, then physics would be as backward as sociology is today.”【注19】 

What can the experimental sociologist possibly do? I think he can do two things: on the one hand, he sets up hypotheses which only involve othernesses (remember: they are ontological entities just as subjectivities and intersubjectivities are) that are suspected to be present in the situation in which the actors are found (to be exact, their definitions of the situation); on the other hand, he tries to find out those specific conditions under which data can be obtained and to obtain them accordingly in order to test the hypotheses positivistically. The latter is called the conditionality of sociological theory【注20】. In the concluding lectures, I shall elaborate my proposal.

The research strategy thus outlined is a nuanced approach to conform to Mill’s view that “understanding a social institution [the exemplar Winch used to represent the social process] consists in observing regularities in the behavior of its participants and expressing these regularities in the form of generalizations.” Othernesses (probably approximately equivalent to “rules” in Winch’s account) are not the “regularities in the behavior” of the actors (“participants”) but the suspected “determinants” of possible “regularities”. “Observing” (that is, obtaining data) is not presumed to be an act the experimental sociologist can freely perform, he can only do so possibly under certain specific conditions. “Generalizations” are weakened into hypotheses to be tested with data.

To be frank, even if the experimental sociologist has religious knowledge (that is, the “rules governing his object of study”) he may still find it difficult to decide whether the prayer of the Pharisee is different from that of the Publican because he will never know the “rules governing his object of study” completely; otherwise, the scientific project of sociology would have been accomplished once and for all. As a result, in spite of some “knowledge” of criteria taken from religion, “his relation to the performers of religious activity” is still “that of observer to observed”, to the possible dismay of Winch.

 4  Summary of observations on 

Winch’s idea with particular reference to sociology

My observations are as follows:

(1) Winch’s idea of social science is primarily concerned with experimental research in social science. He does not seem to be aware of the possibility of dividing sociology into two projects, the speculative and the scientific. Such a division helps to clear up some of the unnecessary confusions.

(2) He is correct in pointing out, as far as experimental research is concerned, the main source of differences between natural science and social science is the absence or presence of human agency (Winch: “language-game” and its “rules”) in the object of study.

(3) But this presence of human agency (Winch: “rules”) does not necessarily rules out detection of regularities or discovery of uniformities as the goal of social science, contrary to what Winch thought. A much more nuanced approach can be adopted to conform to this goal.

(4) The experimental sociologist’s work can be quite constrained, contrary to what Winch’s might have thought. He may have to use the statistical methods mainly, and hence adopt the Stoic causality which fits them well.

(5) Winch is correct in rejecting Hume’s idea of temporal causality, which is blatantly inappropriate for sociology. But he proposed no alternative to it.

(6) Insistence on the connection between explanation and causality is probably unnecessary, since even in the scientific project of sociology explanation in the strict sense is quite impossible to achieve. If there is an explanation, it will most probably be close to an interpretation. Winch has said little on this point.

(7) He advocates that the explanation of human behavior should appeal “to our knowledge of the institutions and ways of life which give his acts their meaning”—a line of explanation already taken by Weber, which Winch knows. His advocacy is in something already present in the scientific project of sociology.

(8) He does not seem to have known the possible presence of otherness in the social process (Winch: “social institution”). Nor did he have a clear vision of tradition, that is “hermeneutical experience is concerned with tradition”; he could not have known that tradition can be an otherness in the social process (“relations between fellow-scientists”).

(9) The advancement in statistical methods and the acceptance of ontology and hermeneutics into sociology has reduced the argumentative force of Winch’s objection to Mill’s idea of social science.

(10) As a passing remark, terms like “ontology” and “hermeneutics” did not enter into The Idea of a Social Science. It perhaps reflects Winch’s immersion in British philosophy at the expense of other European philosophies.

注释

 No.1

There are five chapters, namely, I Philosophical Bearings, II The Nature of Meaningful Behaviour, III The Social Studies as Science, IV The Mind and Society, V Concepts and Actions.

 No.2

 Wikipedia has an entry on Wittgenstein as follows: “Wittgenstein inspired two of the century’s principal philosophical movements, logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy. Professional philosophers have ranked his Philosophical Investigations (1953) and Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) number one and four respectively in a list of the most important books of 20th-century philosophy. … His work is divided between his early period, exemplified by the Tractatus, the only philosophy book he published in his lifetime, and his late period, best articulated in the Investigations. The early Wittgenstein was concerned with the relationship between propositions and the world, and saw the aim of philosophy as an attempt to describe that relationship and correct misconceptions about language through rigid logical abstraction. The latter Wittgenstein was stridently anti-systematic in his approach, rejected many of the conclusions of the Tractatus, and provided a detailed account of the many possible uses of ordinary language, calling language a series of interchangeable language-games in which the meaning of words is derived from their public use; thus there can be no such thing as a private language. Despite these differences, similarities between the early and later periods include a conception of philosophy as a kind of therapy, a concern for ethical and religious themes, and a literary style often described as poetic.”

 No.3

 Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relations to Philosophy, Second Edition (London: Routledge, 1990), x. There are seven sections in Chapter III, namely, 1. J. S. Mill’s “Logic of the Moral Sciences”, 2. Differences in Degree and Differences in Kind, 3. Motives and Causes, 4. Motives. Dispositions and Reasons, 5. The Investigation of Regularities, 6. Understanding Social Institutions, 7. Prediction in the Social Studies.

 No.4

 Ibid, 66.

 No.5

 Ibid., 66-69.

 No.6

 “For any worthwhile study of society must be philosophical in character and any worthwhile philosophy must be concerned with the nature of human society.” Ibid., 3. “I want to argue … that the philosophies of science, art, politics, etc.—subjects which I will call the ‘peripheral’ philosophical disciplines—lose their philosophical character if unrelated to epistemology and metaphysics.” Ibid., 7. “The difference between the respective aims of the scientist and the philosopher might be expressed as follows. Whereas the scientist investigates the nature, causes and effects of particular real things and processes, the philosopher is concerned with the nature of reality as such and in general.” Ibid., 8. “But the force of the philosophical question cannot be grasped in terms of the preconceptions of experimental science. It cannot be answered by generalizing from particular instances since a particular answer to the philosophical question is already implied in the acceptance of those instances as ‘real’.” Ibid., 9.

 No.7

 Lui Ping-keung, Gaze, Action and the Social World (Taipei: Azoth Books, 2007).

 No.8

 See Ibid., Chapter 3.

 No.9

 A detailed account can be found in Ibid., Chapter 5.

 No.10

 Winch, The Idea of a Social Science, op. cit., 83-86.

 No.11

 “society … In its present form, sociology embraces a range of different views concerning both what a social science should comprise, and what might be the proper subject-matter of sociology in particular. The latter provides perhaps the best way of making sense of the discipline. There are three general conceptions of the object of sociological interest—although these are not mutually exclusive. All three can be said to define the study of society but what is meant by society is in each case rather different.

“The first states that the proper object for sociology is social structure, in the sense of patterns of relationships which have an independent existence, over and above the individuals or groups that occupy positions in these structures at any particular time: for example, the positions of the nuclear family (mother, father, children) might remain the same from generation to generation and place to place, independently of the specific individuals who fill or do not fill those positions. There are two main versions of this approach: Marxism, which conceptualizes the structures of modes of production, and Parsonsian structural-functionalism which identifies systems, sub-systems, and role structures.

“A second perspective deems the proper object of sociology to lie in something that we might call, with Durkheim, collective representations: meanings and ways of cognitively organizing the world which have a continued existence over and above the individuals who are socialized into them. Language itself is the paradigm case: it pre-exists our birth, continues after our death, and as individuals we can alter it little or not at all. Much modern structuralist and post-modernist work (in particular, discourse analysis) can be seen as part of this tradition.

“Finally, there are those for whom the proper object of sociological attention is meaningful social action, in the sense intended by Max Weber. The implicit or explicit assumption behind this approach is that there is no such thing as society: merely individuals and groups entering into social relationships with each other. There are widely differing ways in which such interaction can be studied, including Weber’s own concerns with rational action and the relationships between beliefs and actions; the symbolic interactionist concern with the production, maintenance, and transformation of meanings in face-to-face interaction; and the ethnomethodological study of the construction of social reality through linguistic practices. 

“A moment’s reflection will confirm that, between them, these three possible candidates for sociological study almost exhaust the range of what one is likely to meet during the course of social relationships. …” John Scott and Gordon Marshall (eds.), Oxford Dictionary of Sociology (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)

 No.12

 See St. Andrew University’s website,

http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Societies/RS.html. on the history of London Royal Society: “The beginning of the Royal Society came about around 1645 when a group of scientists began to hold regular meetings, The common theme among the scientists who began the Society was acquiring knowledge by experimental investigation. The first group of such men included … Robert Boyle , … Boyle, in his letters written in 1646 and 1647, refers to our Invisible College or the Philosophy College.” Boyle was the discoverer of the Boyle’s Law.

 No.13

 “science, sociology of  A specialism, originating in the United States, which studies the normative and institutional arrangements that enable science to be carried out; or, as Robert Merton puts it, ‘a subdivision of the sociology of knowledge, dealing … with the social environment of that particular kind of knowledge which springs from and returns to controlled experiment or controlled observation’ … The best-known classic studies are those by Merton himself … During the 1970s it became conventional to distinguish this literature from the European (largely British) dominated ‘sociology of scientific knowledge’ …, which is concerned more directly with what is counted as ‘science’—and why. The content of scientific knowledge is largely ignored within the former approach, which tends to assume both universal standards of logic and rationality, and fixed points in the physical world and in Nature. Proponents of the latter view, on the other hand, initiated a relativist revolution which drew attention to the social construction of scientific knowledge—and claimed no access to a Truth or Reality beyond this human activity. …” Scott and Marshall, Oxford Dictionary of Sociology, op. cit.   

 No.14

 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, Second Revised Edition, translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1995), 358.

 No.15

 See Lui Ping-keung, Cogito, Fidimus et Mysterium Societatis (Taipei: Azoth Books, 2009).

 No.16

 See also Lui Ping-keung, “The Administrative Otherness in Social Stratification: Lipset’s Structure-Tension Theory,” in Society (Shanghai University), 2010, issue 4; and “The Monological Tradition of Ethnographic Authority,” presented at Hermeneutics East and West conference jointly organized by Edwin Cheng Foundation Asian Centre for Phenomenology, Archive of Phenomenology and Contemporary Philosophy, and Research Centre of Chinese Philosophy and Culture, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 4-7 November, 2010.

 No.17

 The full story as follows: “To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get. But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”” Luke, 18, 9-14.

 No.18

 Winch, The Idea of a Social Science, op. cit., 86-88.

 No.19

 See Lui Ping-keung, “Comments on Cai Hua’s L’homme pense par l’homme, du statut scientique des sciences socials,” presented at seminar on L’homme pense par l’homme, Research Centre of Ethnic Development and Ethnic Relations, Minzu University of China, Beijing, 9 June, 2009.

 No.20

 See Lui Ping-keung, “Hermeneutics for the Scientific Project of Sociology,” presented at the fourth P.E.A.CE conference at Taiwan, December, 2010. It has been revised into Lecture 11 in this lecture series.

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