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Lundberg offers several statements of the aim
of science.
In one statement he says that the primary
function of all science is to formulate the
sequences that are observable in any phenomena, in
order to be able to predict their recurrence.
In another he says that the goal of all
science is the formulation of valid and verifiable
principles as laws comprehending with the greatest
parsimony all the phenomena of that aspect of the
cosmos which is under consideration.
He defines a scientific law in turn as a
verifiable generalization within measurable degrees
of accuracy of how certain events occur under stated
conditions, and he defines a theory as a deductive
system of laws.
A central thesis in Lundberg's agenda for a
natural science approach to sociology is that
scientific law in social science means exactly what
it means in natural sciences.
He therefore rejects any distinctive type of
scientific law based on verstehen,
and he says that understanding in his sense is not a
method of research, but rather is the end to which
the methods aim. Lundberg's philosophy of scientific
criticism is verificationist, and in his textbook he
defined a law as a verified hypothesis.
Lundberg offers several statements on the
nature of scientific explanation, the topic in which
he is most fundamentally at variance with the
Romantic sociologists.
In one brief statement he says that something
is explained or understood, when the situation is
reduced to elements and correlations among the
elements, which are so familiar that they are
accepted as a matter of course, and curiosity is
then put to rest.
He defines an "element" as any
component that is not in need of explanation or of
further analysis.
Another of his statements is given in terms
of his thesis of frames of reference.
Problematic data are said to be explained
when they are incorporated into previously
established habit systems of response, which
constitute frames of reference.
When this is accomplished, the new
observations are said to have "meaning"
and to be "understood.”
Consistent with his rejection of naturalistic
semantics he says that frames of reference are not
inherent in the universe, but are pure constructions
for our convenience.
He states that the scientist's interest in a
problem requiring a response defines the categories
in terms of which he reports his experience.
When he seeks an explanation, he seeks to
associate data reporting the problematic experience
with what he already knows, i.e. the familiar,
described by his established habit systems of
response, which is the relevant frame of reference.
The frame of reference Lundberg considers
appropriate for a natural science of social
phenomena is behaviorism.
In his Foundations
he references a passage from Robert K. Merton's
"Durkheim's Division of Labor" in American
Journal of Sociology (1934), a relatively early
work in Merton's literary corpus, in which Merton
states that on the Positivist thesis, which says
that science deals only with empirical facts, a
science of social phenomena becomes impossible,
since it relegates to limbo all ends, i.e.
subjective anticipations of future occurrences.
Lundberg says that this view fails to
recognize that anticipated ends in the sense of
conscious prevision exist as words or other symbols
to which the organism responds, just as it does to
other stimuli to action.
In the behavioristic framework words are
entities that are just as objective as physical
things.
No relevant data, even those designated by
such words as "mind" or
"spiritual" are excluded from science, if
these words are manifest in human behavior of any
observable kind.
Like most Positivists Lundberg is unaware
that the meaning of "observable" is
philosophically quite problematic.
Later in his Can
Science Save Us? (1947, 1961) he further
comments about the word "motives" in
relation to frames of reference.
He says that it is a word used to designate
those circumstances to which it seems reasonable to
attribute an occurrence, and that therefore it can
have different meanings depending on the frame of
reference in which it is used.
Lundberg believes that of all reference
frames the scientific frame of reference has proved
to be the most successful for human adjustment to
the environment.
The type of explanation that he explicitly
advocates for sociology is what he calls the
"field" type, which he also calls
relational and situational, and which he opposes to
types that refer to unexplained innate traits of
social agents.
He compares the idea of field to the idea of
space as it is used in geography and ecology.
The geographer describes behavior in terms of
symbolic indices such as birth rates, death rates,
and delinquency rates, for a geographical region,
and then he correlates these indices.
The transition from an ecological map
representing delinquency rates as gradients to an
organizational or functional representation for
sociology involves a transition from a geographical
to a social “space" and from a pictorial to a
more abstract symbolic representation such as
functional equations relating measurements.
In "Social Bookkeeping", the
concluding chapter of his Social Research, Lundberg notes that national demographic statistics
have routinely been collected, and that social
scientists have made successful objective
generalizations on the basis of these data.
He maintains that quantitative sociological
laws can be just as objective as demographic
generalizations.
In the concluding "Epilogue"
chapter of the 1964 edition of his Foundations
Lundberg describes similarities between Parsons'
sociology and that of Stuart Dodd.
Lundberg takes Dodd's work to be exemplary of
the natural science approach in sociology.
Dodd was chairman of the Sociology Department
at the American University in Beruit, Lebanon.
Dodd describes his Dimensions of Society: A Quantitative Systematics for the Social
Sciences (1942) as a "companion
volume" to Lundberg's Foundations,
which Dodd reports he had sent to Lundberg for
prepublication criticism.
This distinctive book and its sequel, Systematic Social Science: A Dimensional Sociology (1947), set forth
a social theory called the S-theory,
which implements Lundberg's philosophy of science.
Dodd's 1942 text contains a distinctive
notational system for elaborately describing social
"situations" in terms of four
"dimensions": the demographic, the
cultural, the ecological, and the temporal.
The 1947 text contains representations for
eleven social institutions.
But the symbols in this notational system
serve principally as a kind of shorthand, and seem
not to be subject to mathematical computation or
transformation, as are theories in natural science.
American sociologists did not accept Dodd's S-theory or his approach.
However, even if the S-theory
had been mathematical as is, say, Newtonian
mechanics or contemporary mathematical economics,
the academic sociologists would not have accepted it
anyhow, because they are too incompetent in
mathematics to assimilate it.
Parsons and Lundberg offer surprising ironies
in their attempts at philosophy of science.
Each for reasons of his own surpassed the
naturalistic thesis of the semantics of language
that is common to both the Positivist and the
Romanticist traditions in philosophy, and in this
respect each had surpassed the academic philosophers
of science who were contemporary to them in the
1930's and 1940's.
Both of them affirm the artifactual thesis of
semantics, the view that the semantics of language
is a cultural artifact rather than a product of
nature.
In this respect these social scientists enjoy
the benefit of a professional perspective uncommon
at the time to the academic philosophers preoccupied
with the philosophy of physics.
Ironically, however, neither Parsons nor
Lundberg exploited the implications of their
philosophically superior view of semantics, because
each brought his own agenda to his ersatz
philosophizing efforts, which in each case is
incompatible with the artifactual-semantics thesis
and the realistic epistemology.
Lundberg arrived at his artifactual-semantics
thesis at the expense of realism, because he carried
forward a subjectivist epistemology from the
Positivist philosophy.
And his fidelity to Positivism cost him any
basis for the objectivity that he thought justifies
his natural-science agenda for social science.
Historically the Positivist basis for
objectivity with the subjectivist epistemology is
the naturalistic-semantics thesis of language.
The copy theory of knowledge is an old
example of a strategy for objectivity with the
subjectivist phenomenalist epistemology.
Bridgman's operationalist definition is a
more contemporary case, which ironically Lundberg
calls upon as the basis for his view that the gap
between the subjective responses constituting
sensory experience and the objective real world is
mediated by an inferential process consisting of
operationalist definitions.
Lundberg may not have realized that both
operationalist definitions and the Positivist
concept of observation are based on the naturalistic
view of semantics.
Parsons arrived at his artifactual-semantics
thesis in a more sophisticated manner, when he said
that all observation is in terms of a conceptual
scheme, and when he said that there is a relativity
or selectivity in the conceptual scheme resulting
from the value relevance or interest of the
scientist.
This relativism is consistent with the
artifactual-semantics thesis, and is not consistent
with the naturalistic-semantics that says the
information in concepts is absolutely fixed and
predetermined by nature.
Furthermore Parsons' approach to the
artifactual-semantics thesis is consistent with his
realistic epistemology, which he calls
"analytical realism.”
Analytical realism enables scientific
observation to describe aspects of the real world
with semantics supplied by the value-relevant
conceptual scheme.
In these noted respects Parsons' philosophy
of science is truly post-Positivist, as he had
claimed.
But there is a problem, which he attempted to
finesse: the artifactual-semantics thesis cannot
support his agenda for a voluntaristic theory of
social action.
This agenda requires a naturalistic-semantics
thesis that would enable Parsons to say that such
aspects of reality as ends, norms, or motives are
not observable in human behavior, but are causes
that must be supplied by imputation by the social
scientist by reflection on his own experience, that
is by verstehen.
In order to implement his agenda, Parsons
says that the relativism introduced by value
relevance obtains within the frames of reference for
the natural sciences and for voluntaristic action,
but does not obtain between them; and on this basis
he distinguishes empirical generalizations about
human behavior appropriate for natural sciences from
the "analytical laws" appropriate to the
action frameworks formed by verstehen.
This thesis is a completely ad
hoc addendum that is inconsistent with the
artifactual-semantics thesis for language.
The claim made by Parsons that ends, norms,
and motives are not observable is erroneous, and it
is not erroneous due to behaviorism, as Lundberg
maintains.
Contrary to Lundberg behaviorism is also
dependent on a naturalistic-semantics thesis of
language.
It is erroneous because, as Parsons says, all
observation is in terms of a conceptual scheme, and
this means that there is an intellectual component
in observation supplied by the linguistic context
constituting the conceptual scheme.
Contemporary Pragmatists, such as Hanson,
have expressed this by saying that observation is
"theory-laden.”
Einstein asserted the same thesis when he
told Heisenberg that theory decides what the
physicist can observe.
The electron was observable by Heisenberg in
the Wilson cloud chamber because his quantum theory
supplied the conceptual scheme that supplied
elementary intelligibility for the phenomenon to be
observably recognizable as an electron's track.
Similarly the verstehen interpretation supplied by the Romantic sociologist is no
less contributing to the semantics of the language
describing observed human behavior than the quantum
theory is to the semantics of the observation report
of the vapor tracks in the Wilson cloud chamber.
Parsons noted that Weber required that the
causal imputation by verstehen
be checked by reference to a logically consistent
system of concepts, which Parsons says is equivalent
to the situation in the natural sciences where
immediate sense perception must be incorporated into
a system of theoretical knowledge.
On the Pragmatist view, however, it is the
whole theoretical system of beliefs including the verstehen
analytical laws that is "checked" by
empirical testing.
Both Weber and Parsons seem to have failed to
see that there can be no requirement for the verstehen concept of causality in the sciences of human behavior,
just as there is no requirement for the Newtonian or
Aristotelian concepts of causality in physics.
Weber's and Parsons' attempt to impose such a
requirement as a condition for causal explanation in
social science, is now recognized to be a fallacy:
the fallacy of demanding ontological criteria for
scientific criticism.
On the contemporary Pragmatist philosophy of
science only empirical criteria may operate in
scientific criticism.
The artifactual-semantics thesis makes all
ontologies as dispensable as the empirical theories
whose semantics describe those ontologies, and it
makes all theories subject only to empirical
criticism without regard to how improbable or
counterintuitive empirically adequate theories may
seem to the individual scientist.
The
METAMODEL System Applied to Sociology
In 1976, five years after Hickey left Notre
Dame and three years after he developed his METAMODEL discovery system, he used the system to develop a
macrosociometric theory of the American national
society with historical time series data describing
fifty years of American history.
In order to display the Romanticist
philosophy of science that still prevails in
American academic sociology, this section firstly
summarizes Hickey's functionalist macrosociometric
theory, and secondly examines the responses of the
editors and referees of four academic sociological
journals to which Hickey had submitted his paper
setting forth his macrosociological model and
findings.
The editors of all four sociological journals
refused to publish Hickey's paper.
Hickey has retained all the original
correspondences from these editors.
In his paper Hickey described his
discovery-system generated macrosociometric model as
a "quantitative functionalist theory of
macrosocial change", and he contrasted it with
Parsons' structural-functionalist approach, which
Hickey called "classical functionalism.”
Classical functionalism is a
social-psychological theory in the Romantic
tradition concerned with the institutionalization of
patterns of value orientations.
It explains social order and stability by the
analysis of motivational processes or
"integrative mechanisms" of socialization
and social control, which integrate social actors'
need dispositions into cultural patterns that always
include value orientations.
Parsons called this process of integration
the fundamental dynamic theorem of sociology and the
core phenomenon of the dynamics of the social
system.
When this stability or equilibrium is
extended throughout the macrosociety, the result is
called consensus equilibrium.
Hickey noted that the classical functionalist
theory does not explain social change.
As Parsons stated, the institutionalization
of cultural-value orientations by these integrative
mechanisms relate to social change only as forces of
resistance except to the degree that the
macrosociety is described as malintegrated, in which
case these mechanisms legitimate deviant behavior.
Hickey thus maintains that Parsons' paradigm
of motivational processes is not an adequate
theoretical basis for the analysis of macrosocial
change, and he rejects the reductionist dogma that a
macrosociological theory must be built up from a
social-psychological or microsociological analysis
of motivational processes, as had been envisioned by
classical functionalists.
Hickey also invokes the definition of
functionalism in terms of consequences, and
references the distinction between manifest and
latent functions proposed by Merton, to enable
sociological theory to explain the unintended and
unforeseen consequences of social actors' behavior
that cannot be explained in terms of conscious
motivational processes.
Furthermore as a Pragmatist, Hickey maintains
that sociological theory like any scientific theory
permits but does not require a Romantic ontology for
a valid sociological explanation.
Accordingly while his basis for his selection
of distinctively sociological variables in his
theory is that these variables reference the fact
that the behavior of the social actors is voluntary
group associational behavior that reveals cultural
values distinctive of particular social
institutions, he admits to no requirement that he
structure his equations on the basis of any
postulated motivations, nor does he admit to the
more extreme demand of some Romantics that such
motivations be empathetically based and imputed to
social actors in accordance with the verstehen criterion for sociological explanation and criticism.
Hickey's approach is not only an alternative
to the reductionist social psychology of classical
functionalism that still prevails in sociology, it
is also an alternative to attempts to reduce
demographic and sociological phenomena to economic
motives, as has been proposed by 1992 Nobel laureate
economist, Gary S. Becker (1930-
), a University of Chicago professor of
economics and sociology.
Becker is a Romantic economist, who employs
the neoclassical economists' rationality postulate
to explain such sociological phenomena as marriage,
divorce, education and crime, and also demographic
phenomena. He maintains that marriage, family size,
education, etc. are economic decisions, because they
involve incentives.
His theory-of-choice approach based on
rationality postulates assumes the calculating
attitude (for which he actually develops
calculations), that sociologists contrast to the
attitude of respect and of voluntary conformity that
is institutionalized by socialization and social
control.
Furthermore, while Hickey's approach is
related to the Institutionalist tradition in
economics, he goes beyond Institutionalist economics
to include consideration of all of the five basic
institutions in the macrosociety, and he models the
functional relations among them.
Hickey uses the distinctively sociological
perspective for the explanation of these
sociological phenomena; it is not reducible to
neoclassical economic theory, nor is it merely an
extension of Institutionalist economics.
Hickey does not exclude or reject the effects
of economic conditions from his explanatory
equations; in fact he explicitly includes economic
variables. He proposes a distinctively
macrosociological perspective that includes
macroeconomic conditions.
The variables in Hickey's theory fall into
two broad classes: (1) the institutional variables
representing types of groups associated with each of
the five basic social institutions, and (2)
noninstitutional factors.
The institutional variables are
sociologically relevant, because they are per
capita rates having numerators describing
aggregate voluntary group-associational behavior,
thereby making the per
capita rates measures of voluntary consensus
within the macrosociety.
They measure degrees of consensus on
undefined scales of more-or-less about the
institutionalized cultural value systems distinctive
of each of the five basic types of institutional
groups.
Consensus represents the extent of
integration of the members of society about the
institutional values, integration that is necessary
for the type of group to function and to continue in
existence.
A decline in consensus about the
institutional values results in an increase in the
incidence of dissolution of the associated type of
group.
The five basic institutional groups are the
family or domestic type of group, the church or
religious type of group, the school or educational
type of group, the business enterprise or economic
type of group, and the law-governed macrosociety
itself. The family group is represented by the per
capita marriage rate and also by the per
capita divorce rate.
These two variables describe new family
formation and dissolution respectively.
The religious type of group is represented by
the per capita
rate of religious affiliation.
The educational institutional group is
represented by the percent of
seventeen/eighteen-year olds that graduate from high
school.
The economic type of group is represented by
the per capita new business enterprise formation net of voluntary
dissolutions.
The institution of government is not
represented by any political group but by the
reciprocal of the per
capita homicide rate; this variable describes
the rate of voluntary conformity with the minimum
conditions codified into criminal law for membership
in good standing in the macrosociety.
Except for the divorce rate, increases in the
per capita
rates for all the institutional variables represent
increased consensus about their distinctive cultural
value systems.
The noninstitutional variables identify
factors that have been proposed in the sociological
literature as relevant to macrosocial change.
Demographic change is represented by the
crude birth rate.
Technological innovation is represented by
the per capita
number of patent applications for inventions.
Macroeconomic business cycle conditions
together with longer secular economic trends are
represented by the per
capita real income measured by the
constant-dollar gross national product.
Military mobilization during wartime is
represented by the per
capita number of armed forces active duty
personnel.
Mass communications media is represented by
personal consumption expenditures per
capita for newspapers, books, periodicals and
cinema, plus business income to radio and television
broadcasting firms.
Ecological change is represented both for
internal migration due to urbanization represented
by the percent of the population living on farms,
the most important internal migration at the time,
and for international immigration represented by the
per capita
rate of foreign immigration.
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