Sociologisme: een produkt van een misleidende zegswijze?

Samenvatting

Sociologism is defined as the view, held by E. Durkheim & others, that sociological explanations can never have a psychological character. It is shown that Durkheim's own theory of suicide does not satisfy his definition of a sociological explanation, since it involves the psychological link that men's unhappy feelings cause them to commit suicide. Then, it is argued that phrases such as, 'The social environment determines ...' are systematically misleading in G. Ryle's sense ("Systematically Misleading Expressions," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 32, 1931-1932). Their syntactic form implies the existence of an agent (the social environment) while they merely express a r between a type of situation & a type of action. Durkheim in particular reifies social situations as if they were phenomena having an independent existence. It is said that all explanatory sociological statements are equivalent to statements about human nature, because the characteristics of the objects of sociology (groups, institutions, structures) can be entirely reduced to characteristics of the individual members of these groups. A. Orianne.