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Sociology as History and Science

logist does not start with the assumption that individual and group behaviors tend toward the random, an experimental error has already been made. Again, the multiplicity of human behavior variables insures that randomness will be the norm. In his Knowledge for What?, Robert S. Lynd (1939) criticizes that "this bias in favor of the manageably known is intrinsic in the academic culture." He maintains that social scientists have a shared myopia: "We professors were trained by our professors, who were in turn trained by their professors, to enter a discipline, i.e., an artificially abstracted and fenced off area of our culture" (Lynd, 1939, p. 118).

The whole of sociology may be more than the sum of its parts. If we take the parts of sociology to be the minds of individuals, than a social group may be characterized by adding the constituent minds. Will the social mind be more than its constituents? Abraham Kaplan (1964) denies this in his The Conduct of Inquiry: "J.S. Mill held flatly that human beings in society have no properties but those which are derived from, and may be resolved into, the laws of the nature of individual man. In social phenomena the composition of causes is the universal law" (Mill, 1964, p. 113).

If the above assertion by J.S. Mill were true, as Freud would agree, societal laws are to be derived from those of psychology. In this case, social laws are not greater than the sum of their parts. On the other hand, as Kaplan points out, "Durkheim, Weber, and others insisted on the autonomy of the science of society" (Kaplan, 1964, p. 113). A greater social dynamic is at work than can be explained by looking at the group as the totality of its minds. Compared to psychology, sociology views the individual from the outside, thus encompassing the fields of social psychology, history, and anthropology.

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Sociology as History and Science. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 15:42, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1682034.html