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Date: Mon, 10 Jun 1996 14:21:17 -0400
To: socgrad@csf.colorado.edu
From: ghougham@medicine.bsd.uchicago.edu (Gavin Hougham)
The recent postings on social psychology, chaos/complexity, non-linearity
and most recently "quantum sociodynamics" reminded me of part of the
argument in the last chapter of  _Habits of the Heart_ (actually, an
appendix in the original 1985 edition, but also see the updated edition with
a new Introduction dated January, 1996).

Bellah, et al.'s essay on "Social Science as Public Philosophy" speaks to
some of the groping unease expressed here with the inability of sociology
(or social psych, or ethology,  or biology...) alone to "get it right."   If
I am not wrong, I hear lots of people saying either, "Well, OK, but that
doesn't explain X, Y, or Z in the right proportions," OR "We are not parsing
out to the various disciplines the explanatory tasks in the right proportions."

As Lynn S. wrote in a recent post:
>> When all else fails, try a sociological explanation first!

Bellah et al. speak to these "sociological reasons" in the "professional"
nature of the modern academy, and argued: "For knowledge of society as a
whole involves not merely the acquisition of useful insights from
neighboring disciplines but transcending disciplinary boundaries
altogether.... The most important boundary that must be transcended is the
recent and quite arbitrary boundary between the social sciences and the
humanities."  Their remarks also remind me of a much older essay by C.P.
Snow (?) on the "two worlds" of science... (cite, anyone?).

Starts to sound like what Jean C. called for when she said:
>>Valuable as such models are, they don't yet address things I consider
>>to be more fundamental about social life, such as identity, meaning,
>>the nature of agency and action, consciousness, and all the 'why'
>>questions.

Well, here is a program for the ambitious: What "discipline" can synthesize
and transcend all these boundaries?  IS it sociology?  Is it the sociology
we have now?  To what extent have extant or historically placed disciplines
(moral philosophy ?) tried, and under what circumstances?  What warrants are
used in these projects?  Have fun.


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Gavin Hougham
University of Chicago
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