Psychologisme: dit keer als resultaat van naïef concretisme. Een antwoord aan A. Th. Derksen

Samenvatting

A comment on A. Th. Derksen's "Sociologisme: een produkt van een misleidende zegswijze" (see SA 26:5/78J5860). Derksen tried to refute what he calls "sociologism," ie, "the conviction that every explanatory sociological proposition can't be at the same time psychological in nature, nor can be transferred into a psychological one without loss of meaning." He argues that this conviction could have arisen out of "misleading expressions." These are expressions which, due to their grammatical or syntactic form, lead to faulty convictions. Derksen's argument does not hold, because it is based on the assumption that only expressions that refer to concrete, visible objects deal with realities, whereas expressions that refer to abstractions do so analogous to the former, but are faulty & misleading. Explanations solely in terms of (concrete) persons do not suffice to cover the social world. One also needs sociological concepts, concepts that refer to phenomena that are as real as the will of persons. Sociological concepts, such as institution, group, & structure, stand for more than indications of collections of individuals. They can be used as indications of a reality, because the actions of individuals in a network of relations generate, through processes of objectivation of meaning, undesired results, which in turn control further actions. In Sociologisme: een produkt van een misleidende zegswijze II (Sociologism: The Product of a Misleading Expression II), A. Th. Derksen claims that van Poucke misrepresents Derksen in several respects. Van Poucke does not reduce sociology to psychology, nor can his critique of sociologism be reduced to a mere linguistic matter. Furthermore, van Poucke implicitly agrees that sociological explanations must sometimes have a psychological content. Van Poucke also claims that only concrete persons, not mere social positions, can determine another person's behavior. Norms do not exist apart from individuals that uphold them, & therefore, one cannot speak, in a literal sense, of norms determining the conduct of any individual. Modified AA.