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Chaos of Disciplines

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The title is great and the art work on the cover is stunning. The author takes commonplace ideas, the most important of which is that there are perennial dichotomies in some social science disciplines, and we can arrive at a virtually continuous distribution of viewpoints by successive division of a subdivision, and hitches them to the sexy notion of chaos and self-similarity.

The problem is that the analogy with chaotic dynamics is just too tendentious and far-fetched to bear any theoretical weight. Abbot never shows that there are more than two levels of dichotomization or self-similarity. This is not chaos, but rather a grid with a few cells.

Abbott's remarks on the structure of social science disciplines is descriptively accurate, has nothing to do with chaos, but is not at all enlightening. His analysis of interdisciplinarity is trivial. He appears to know sociology, but not the other disciplines.

The most interesting chapter is a review of the history of social constructivism in sociology. The American roots of this congeries of doctrines goes back to the pragmatism of George Herbert Mead and John Dewey, elaborated brilliantly by W. I. Thomas and Robert Park, all of the Chicago school. In Europe, the roots lie in the amazingly insightful work of Alfred Schutz, combining Husserlian phenomenology and Weberian sociology. In the USA, Berger and Luckmann brilliantly combined the American and European contributions, giving us one of the most important contributions of sociology to general social theory. Schutz also influenced Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology and Erving Goffman's symbolic interactionism. Abbott's main point is that social constructivism reappears regularly in sociology at about 20 year intervals, but is then quashed by some form of realistic reaction, only to reappear again. This of course has nothing to do with chaos--the old pendulum analogy works perfectly well here.

This is an aside, but I cannot refrain from remarking how truly tragic this history of social constructivism is, and how nicely it reflects the theoretical vapidity of sociological theory. A correct theory of the interaction of individual agency and social structure (e.g., as adumbrated in the life-work of Talcott Parsons and develop in game-theoretic terms in my book, The Bounds of Reason) exhibits a natural harmony of realism (the division of labor, the production of daily life, the specification of our species characteristics through gene-culture coevolution) and social construction (the communality of beliefs, knowledges, and ideational representations through cultural systems). I argue that we share certain beliefs because they are mutually accessible natural occurrences, but other shared beliefs are purely socially constructed, although their temporal permanence and their capacity to displace competing beliefs are governed by an analytically accessible dynamic akin to the replicator dynamic in evolutionary theory.

Sociology will forever be doomed to cycles of realism and constructivism until theorists reestablish the Parsonian quest for a unified basis for sociology. Parsons himself was far from completely successful, but I think his pattern variables are very useful for defining the boundaries between economics (adaptation) and sociology (integration). This conceptual scheme is a great step beyond his attempts in The Structure of Social Action, which relied on a questionable set of epistemological categories inherited with modification from Pareto.

Abbott's attempts at extrapolating to the future, and at dealing with ethical issues, are perfunctory and desultory.

This book is better than post-modernism, but not much. It is post-modernism without the burning anti-science agenda.

This is one of the best books in the field of the sociology of science or should we say the sociology of sociology? Abbott is an enormously creative scholar. In this book he develops the idea to analyze scientific discourses as fractals. But instead of arguing the whole book, why this is an accurate approach, Abbott sets out to develop this basic idea further and further. This book is a prime example of creative sociological scholarship!