From: Scott Chase (osteopilus@yahoo.com)
Date: Sat 02 Apr 2005 - 21:00:45 GMT
I'm in the process of skimming back through _The Rules
of Sociological Method_ in response to Kate's
excellent post where she compares and contrasts
socifacts and memes, something I've been asking about
for a long time here.
It appears Durkheim has a little more depth in his
approach to where we inherit socifacts from than Kate
gives him credit for, but more in a theoretical sense
than practical or applied sense perhaps. In addendum
to my previous posts about Durkheim's nifty
delineation between function and origin, this
following quote should add more fuel to
the fire:
(p. 121) [ED] "The religious dogmas of Christianity
have not changed for centuries, but the role they play
in our modern societies is no longer the same as in
the Middle Ages. Thus words serve to express new ideas
without their contexture changing. Morever, it is a
proposition true in sociology as in biology, that the
organ is independent of its function, i.e. while
staying the same it can serve different ends. Thus the
causes which give rise to its existence are
independent of the ends it serves." [ED]
His treatment of religious dogma is akin to tracing a
structure back phylogenetically to see if its function
has shifted. He is obviously carrying on the structure
versus function debate that made Geoffrey and Cuvier
famous previous to Darwin. And he is veering into
exaptation territory here, where we might see that a
structure might be co-opted to a different function
down the road and if we assess present function of an
organ, that doesn't give us license to speculate that
the organ originated to serve that function.
Thus, Durkheim has a bit of depth here in the same
sense of a biologist looking back through phylogeny
for answers about what they see presently. It would
seem more than one generation deep.
As far as Durkheim's assertion of independence for
socifacts apart from mentifacts (or individual
representations), I'm not too keen on setting
sociology apart from other disciplines. I favor a
social psychological approach myself that has a foot
in both the cultural and individual realms. Being a
pioneer of sociology, at that time an infant science,
I can see why he would want to set his field apart
using a socifact oriented POV. This isn't too much
different from Dakwins focusing on genes.
I'm thinking that Durkheim believed that socifacts had
emergent properties, where collective representations
are more than a sum of individual representations.
This might be a little vague, but he might have looked
at collective phenomenon as resulting from the way
individual phenomenon were arranged or organized.
There's a danger of vitalism when one takes holism to
extremes though. His discussion of the ways that
biological phenomena are not simply reducible to
chemistry and physics leaves much to be desired, but I
can see why he's making an assertion of autonomy for
sociology and the socifacts he wants to study. Not
exactly my mason jar of iced tea.
Emile Durkheim. 1982. The Rules of Sociological
Method. The Free Press. New York, translated by WD Halls
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