>Most sociologists I've encountered lately simply ignore >the issue and are simply empiricist.
Lopreato and Crippen wrote a very interesting book on this subject: CRISIS IN SOCIOLOGY: The Need for Darwin The authors feel that unless sociology incorporates the EM, it "risks deletion from the academia in the next twenty-five to thirty years." I think it's an outstanding piece! I enjoyed it immensely. Jay ========================== CRISIS IN SOCIOLOGY: The Need for Darwin, by Joseph Lopreato and Timothy Crippen http://www.amazon.com/Crisis-Sociology-Darwin-Joseph-Lopreato/dp/0765808749 Preface We are proud but concerned sociologists. We worry lest in the near future the current course of sociology will lead to academic self-destruction. We trust, therefore, that our readers will be influenced less by our criticisms of the current state of our discipline and more by our sincere, enthusiastic attempt to suggest a way out of what is by many accounts a very grave and deepening crisis. Not all sociologists agree with this diagnosis. Many probably are so burdened by the heavy demands of their daily commitments to teaching and research that routine has become its own end. Others deny the crisis, or at least argue that it could be rather easily dispelled if only sociologists would make fairly minor adjustments in their practices. Some of the more common prescriptions would require fewer useless debates and mutually destructive critiques, a better integration of theory and methods, greater attempts at unification of existing theories, better public relations, and, among others, a greater objectivity so as to, avoid ideology-of class, race, gender, and so on. Still other members of the discipline share our own concerns in varying degrees. Some of these work outside universities, where demands on their craft tend to be practical and specific. There they often find that their skills are poorly valued because the "real world" and sociology have little or nothing in common. Others are academicians proud of their craft's potential but often exhausted by fruitless endeavors, their own included, to resolve the crisis and nurture the promise. Such scholars write books and articles on "the crisis in sociology," the "decomposition of sociology," the "trained incompetence" of sociologists, and related topics exemplified by journal symposia titles such as "What's Wrong with Sociology?" The indictments, or mere analyses, indicate a disturbing state of affairs. For instance, sociologists repeatedly take one another to task for failing to define concepts clearly and to develop genuinely falsifiable theories. They engage in debates that, in modified language, recur every few years. They have produced "no sociological theory if you mean empirical relationships that are comfortably predictable and general enough to turn up across more than one topic"; that is, they may speak of sociological laws, but these are neither real nor recognized as such. There is widespread separation between theory and method; and even our statistics, a major portion of our "methodology," are almost entirely imported from such disciplines as economics and biology, and often employed to bewilder rather than to inform the reader. Further, most sociologists specialize in descriptive research that is motivated by "their personal interests and sometimes experience." And as if these were not problems enough, many sociologists are distressed that their once promising science is now awash in the flotsam of extreme cultural relativism and multiculturalism, postmodernism, political correctness, and, permeating these and other isms, an ideological agenda driven by provincial concerns of race, class, and the many grievances of a radical brand of feminism. To a degree, our sister disciplines - for example, psychology, anthropology, political science - share our plight. But they - especially psychology and to a lesser extent anthropology - are being better steered by their long-entrenched linkage to evolutionary biology. From this perspective, they - along with various branches of zoology and several offshoots of sociology itself (e.g., urban studies, criminal justice, social work) - are actively cannibalizing sociology. The external threat feeds with little or no resistance on our internal shortcomings. Our own fear is that the crisis in sociology is so grave and pervasive that the once proud science of society risks deletion from the academia in the next twenty-five to thirty years. Our problems are many. But fundamentally, the crisis is rooted in our failure to discover and utilize even a single law or principle general enough to suggest a large number of logically interrelated hypotheses. Inevitably such a tool would also provide the logic needed for coherent conceptualization and operationalization, appropriate methods of falsification, and hence the guidance toward a growing body of systematic, cumulative knowledge represented by a hierarchy of theoretical propositions cutting across the entire institutional framework. We further hold that, given our failure to independently discover general principles, we, like modern psychology and anthropology, should borrow them, with whatever modifications may seem appropriate, from the natural science closest in subject matter to sociology. We should stress here that, for us, sociology must be a science if it is to be anything at all. Hence, those who do not share this vision will find our book irrelevant and even antithetical to their scholarly interests. The natural science closest to sociology, as to other social sciences, is evolutionary biology. For 150 years, this branch of knowledge has constituted a marvelous scientific revolution. In recent decades, moreover, evolutionary biology has made giant strides toward the study of behavior, human conduct included, through refinements of Darwinian theory, several aspects of genetic science, and such evolutionary disciplines as human ethology, primatology, neurobiology, neuroendocrinology, and Darwinian psychology, among others. Here, more than anywhere else, is where the action is today in behavioral science. Sociology will participate in this revolution or it will be cancelled out of the intellectual landscape. Accordingly, this volume is divided into three parts. The first, consisting of chapters 1-3, begins by offering a glimpse of the early promise of sociology - a promise that, however, may have contained the virus of the subsequent crisis. It proceeds, in chapter 2, to define the crisis, mostly in terms suggested by sociologists themselves, and then 'concludes with a brief discussion in chapter 3 of some of the basic causes of the crisis. Given our view of the necessary tie between evolutionary biology and sociology, part 2 presents, first, the basic elements of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection (chapter 4) and then, in chapter 5, a brief discussion of basic elements of neo-Darwinian theory as it has evolved since around 1930. The concluding part 3 consists of four application chapters. The sixth and the seventh are devoted to several aspects of sex-differentiated behavior, topics that of late have been monopolized by "feminist theorists." Here, especially in chapter 6, is where we find the detritus that may be most detrimental to sociological survival. As two women critics have put it, radical feminism constitutes a kind of "new creationism" that "defies common sense" and "ill suits an academic tradition rhetorically committed to human freedom." Our strategy in this part is to critically examine select feminist arguments and try to make better sense of them with a view to showing theoretical complementarity, where possible, between them and the material presented in part 2. The remaining two chapters are devoted, respectively, to an attempt to (1) provide an evolutionary explanation of the rise, universality, and persistence of dominance orders (what sociologists term "social stratification") and (2) apply a corresponding approach to the universality and persistence of ethnicity and ethnic conflict in human society. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
