Integrating Differences: Philosopical Aspects in Sociology and Vice Versa (eBook)

Georg Peter, Reuss-Markus Krausse (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
382 Seiten
BoD - Books on Demand (Verlag)
978-3-8192-3986-1 (ISBN)

Infos

Integrating Differences: Philosopical Aspects in Sociology and Vice Versa Commemorative Volume in honor of Gerhard Preyer

Textauszug

INTEGRATING DIFFERENCES: PHILOSOPICAL ASPECTS IN SOCIOLOGY AND VICE VERSA

Georg Peter and Reuss-Markus Krausse

This is Volume 40 of our scientific journal ProtoSociology: We never thought we would come this far. This means that the ProtoSociology project is also thirty-three years old. But speaking of age and numbers, this volume is especially dedicated to Gerhard Preyer and his work, who doubles the number of volumes in years. He is the editor and founder of the journal and is responsible for the progress and development of the project of the same name. In a mixture of reconstruction and retrospective, it might be a good idea to start with the more programmatic concept:

The term “ProtoSociology” is partly inspired by Paul Lorenzen’s constructive theory of language and science, which encouraged the project in its initial phase to establish a proto-theoretical approach in sociology. Prototheories are conceived there as the foundation of a specialized science. Based on initial objectives and linguistic distinctions, they attempt to contribute to the methodological structure of a specialized language and to systematize the preliminary understanding of the object and experiential realm of the social sciences. In other words, proto-sociology is primarily a meta-theoretical enterprise.

The approaches to such systematization are fed by the three dominant currents in twentieth-century philosophy:

• the analytic philosophy of language, beginning with Frege, Wittgenstein, and Carnap,
• the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, and
• Heidegger’s hermeneutic fundamental ontology.

This leads to the main research areas of lifeworld and system, modernization theory, analytic action, and language and interpretation theory. The aim of the project and the associated journal was to lay the foundations of the social sciences in terms of language theory, which already indicates the close connection to related disciplines such as philosophy, social sciences and linguistics, as well as to a sociological systems theory. The project is thus linked to a Frankfurt tradition represented by Jürgen Habermas and his Theory of Communcative Action, insofar as it is a fundamentally oriented combination of philosophical with social and socio-theoretical problems. From a philosophical perspective, an analytical theory of interpretation and action and from a sociological perspective a further-reaching systems theory approach form the core. With this ambitious and comprehensive conception, the Theory of Communicative Action was the last of the grand theories to fail. The combination of a sociological theory of society and a theory of action based on analytical speech theory was confronted with some major structural problems (Preyer 2000).

For ProtoSociology – journal and project – this meant that we lost our programmatics, but not our focus. Two of Gerhard Preyer’s favorite dictums are the Chinese “follow the change” and “you have to reinvent yourself ”. But they have to be realized equally: not only in documenting change, but also in constituting it. Thus, all the projects that were initiated and carried out – the book publications and the journal – became a process rather than a momentary snapshot of the state of the art. The controlled project process itself also has a discursive form, which can be explained both by the development of the underlying problem through the work and by the communication between the participants. The works received influence the progress and conceptualization of the project as a work in progress. They reveal new issues and point to follow-on problems that may be addressed by new contributors, or may initiate a new project. On the other hand, authors are also in contact with each other through the journal and can build on previous collaborations, etc. ProtoSociology is thus a medium of communication, not only through the finished journal, but also through the special kind of project work on which it is based. Instead of simply inviting papers on a particular topic, we conceptualize and formulate a scientific problem within and during the project, to which leading scholars in the field are invited to contribute.

This also explains why Gerhard Preyer has such a strong publication record in the social sciences and philosophy. He simply followed the change, which is also a result of his own work. But if we look more closely, it still seems that the philosophical part has more often a sociological impact than vice versa.

Philosophy within and close by of sociology

In the early 1980s, in collaboration with Michael Roth (Preyer and Roth 1989), a first version of the problem situation of analytic philosophy was drafted, which was later elaborated and somewhat modified. This was preceded by the treatment of the problem situation of the analytic theory of action, which reached its zenith in German philosophy in the 1970s. Rüdiger Bubner, Jürgen Habermas, and Herbert Schnädelbach gave lectures on this topic. Analytical action theory was relevant to the project because the notion of logical form is a link between it, action theory, linguistic theory, sociological theory, and ontology. This is especially worth mentioning because analytic action theory has not been adequately treated by sociologists working in the segment of sociological action theory. It was the connecting element between the sociological and the philosophical aspects of Preyer’s project. But from the very beginning there was a deep and broad philosophical reconstruction of these discussions. It was not limited by any sociological programmatic, making it a vehicle for the completion of a social theory. Remarkably, pragmatics and speech act theory seemed at the time to be a kind of magic bullet for all sorts of problems in the humanities, even in literary studies.

The best example of this is Donald Davidson. Starting in the late 1980s, Gerhard Preyer was one of the first philosophers to study Donald Davidson’s philosophy in Germany. With several book publications from 1997 to 2011, it has also been a focus of his work, leading him from speech act theory and contextualism (Preyer and Peter 2005, 2007) to the philosophical mind. A retrospective on Jean Paul Sartre in the context of contemporary philosophy of mind (Preyer and Miguens 2016) is the latest step. Calling it a sideline should not detract from the importance and continuity of this philosophical part, but there are two aspects that will lead to a better picture.

In book publications or in the journal, the focus has always been on philosophers doing the work of a sociologist. This close relationship was not justified by theoretical concerns. ProtoSociology did what its name says: it analyzed the basic terms of a theory using the idea of transdisciplinarity, where sociological topics are examined from a different angle.

For example, problems of understanding others, i.e. interpreting the feelings and beliefs of others, may be discussed not by psychologists or sociologists, but by philosophers. Two of our volumes are examples of this. In the first case, Folk Psychology, Mental Concepts, and the Ascription of Attitudes, the basic conditions under which one ascribes certain feelings and attitudes to someone in everyday language were discussed. The other volume, Understanding the Social: New Perspectives from Epistemology, dealt with the question of the extent to which one can ascribe common beliefs to a group, and whether it can be understood only as a collection of individuals. of individuals, or whether, following Hegel, the whole of the group is more than the sum of its parts or members. In this way, fundamental problems of psychology are also addressed from a “foreign” perspective.

Closely related are the publications on cognitive semantics and social ontology. Methodologically, social ontology poses the question: Do we need to introduce new ontological categories to describe social reality, or can our social reality be described with the familiar (but no less controversial) categories? Can social properties have a causal effect? Can the laws of social reality (if they exist) be traced back to the laws of individual psychology?

One of the most important questions in the social sciences concerns the relationship between the individual and groups or society as a whole. Together with Raimo Tuomela and later Margaret Gilbert, Gerhard Preyer has realized several projects that give a philosophical perspective to this sociological problem.

Raimo Tuomela’s Social Ontology discusses a variety of related topics concerning situations where people actually form a group and share collectively intentional states that depend on the group’s main goals, interests, values, beliefs, and norms etc, as well as act together as group members.

Tuomela developed a “collective acceptance view of sociality” using the distinction between “I-mode” and “we-mode” notions and states. The extended account expands the scope of this framework by adding the notion of “external authorities” that control social groups. Similarly, its central notion of the we-mode is analogously extended to the case of power. One of the main goals of the Collective Acceptance View of Sociality is to analyze the conceptual resources and theorizing of the social domain from both the individual and collective points of view, and this includes an account of the “shared point of view”. Some topics new to the literature on social ontology and collective intentionality are analyzed. These include group solidarity, group reasons and...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 7.7.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Sprachwissenschaft
• Schlagworte: Austin • intentionality • Multiple Modernities • Philosophy of mind • political identities
• ISBN-10: 3-8192-3986-3 / 3819239863
• ISBN-13: 978-3-8192-3986-1 / 9783819239861