>and there's the positivism! :)
I realize you have a smilie-con there, but i don't get it? i'm not a positivist. i quoted a positivist-naturalist who believes that we can create a science of everything, with physics at the foundation, and each branch of the sciences capable of telling us, in law-like fashion, about how this "everything" works. (that's put too simply) Now, if even a guy who takes as his model of science, physics, can say that humanities are sciences, then....
>but my point for a long time in this whole sequence
>of threads has been that we need to find ways to
>positively address this need for meaning -- the thing
>that religion speaks to -- if we're going to bring people
>along.
people are provided with meaning in all kinds of venues. were there no religions as we conventionally think of them, there'd be meaning -- and there'd be rituals and beliefs about the sacred/profane -- only they'd exist in forms we don't, today, identify as religion. we already have a shared religion in the u.s., we worship the individual. we don't just voluntarily do so: we HAVE to. we have no choice in the matter. if we don't, we will be taken away rather quickly by grim-faced people in white suits carrying a large fish net.
now, if you're saying that people need meaning, and religion provides it in a way that these other venues do not, then this is just the deprivation thesis in disguise.
in that sense, i totally agree with carrol. the continued existence of religion and spirituality (attribution of the experience of the power of society to something supernatural) will continue to drop away. that it exists today doesn't convince me that it won't go away. And, we'll still have plenty of religion. no one today, though, would recognize it as such -- well some would.
>right. i was almosst going to ask kelley about whether sociology sees
>itself technologically, as producing the means for manipulating the
>culture it studies in the way that physics manipulates atoms. but
>then i wussed out and back off.
>
>anyway -- comte kind of DID see himself more or less that way, didn't
>he? but i don't get the impression that the discipline in general
>does, these days.
why would you wuss out? or back off!? Dayyyyyang!
The very best treatment of the general differences between the positivists (Comte onward), the interpretivists, and radical social scientists is Brian Fay's _Social Theory and Political Practice_ which shows how all these forms of social theory have conceptions of political practice, not just accidentally bound up in their ontological and epistemological claims, but logically so. Maybe a few feel as Comte did, but Comte was writing in a particular historical era and imagined himself a kind of priest of a new social movement. A fascinating treatment of the rise of the social sciences in the U.S. is Thomas Haskell's "The Emergence of Professional Social Science."
Adam Seligman's _The Idea of Civil Society_ examines how the idea of society came to exist, particular among the Scottish Moralists (of which Adam Smith was one -- and not surprisingly Smith's other great work was a huge volume on morality).
Society had to be actually discovered first, before anyone imagined it needed studying, let alone was amenable to technological manipulation.
I had a mentor who always told us to ask of a text: "What's the author afraid of?"
Well Comte and others who founded the social sciences were afraid of social disorder -- in the same way the debates over the origin of value terrified people who grappled with that question. If there is nothing concrete that determines value, what could it possibly be determined by that wasn't shifting, amorphous, fleeting (and underneath that obvious terror was the less obvious terror: if there's nothing concrete we can point to, won't society fall apart?)
So the people who'd eventually come to be called the founders of the social sciences were terrified that social cohesion would be lost if there were no feudally ordered society upon which to base everything.
If it's just fleeting, amorphous, transient, and perhaps merely based on the exercise of power, even legitimate power (authority), this was quite a terrifying thought. (and it still terrifies us today.)
There is no "discipline in general" feeling among sociologists -- only fields of essentially contested questions -- anyway. heh.
kelley
"Finish your beer. There are sober kids in India."
-- rwmartin