RE: LIMITS TO BRAINS

On Wed, 25 Aug 1999, Jay Hanson wrote:

> Behalf Of Boris Stremlin
> 
> >You know, a little reading in the social sciences may clue you in as to
> >what students of the "social world" actually think about the
> >interrelations between the two spheres.   It really beats relying on
> 
> The only enlightened sociologist that I have read is William Catton.  But I
> have spent the last few years trying to understand neoclassical economic
> theory, and am the first to admit that I am not up on cutting-edge
> sociology.
> 
> Please don't keep me in the dark Boris!  What do sociologists think about
> the relationship between "net energy" (or EROI ratios) and society?

Since my claim was that sociologists do not ignore the impact of other
spheres on society, and since I take it that even you do not reduce the
laws of biology and psychology to the laws of thermodynamics, let me
illustrate the point with the following example:

"Before beginning the search for the method appropriate to the study of
social facts it is important to know what are the facts termed 'social'.
	The question is all the more necessary because the term is used
without much precision.  It is commonly used to designate almost all
phenomena that occur within society, however little social interest of
some generality they present.  Yet under this heading there is, so to
speak, no human occurence that cannot be called social.  Every individual
drinks, sleeps, eats, or employs his reason, and society has every
interest in seeing that these functions are regularly exercised.  If
therefore these facts were social ones, sociology would possess no subject
matter peculiarly its own, and its domain would be confused with that of
biology and psychology.
	However, in reality there is in every society a clearly determined
group of phenomena separable, because of their distinct characteristics,
from those that form the subject matter of other sciences of nature.
	When I perform my duties as a brother, a husband or a citizen and
carry out the commitments I have entered into, I fulfil obligations which
are defined in law and custom and which are external to myself and my
actions.  Even when they conform to my own sentiments and when I feel
their reality within me, that reality does not cease to be objective, for
its is not I who have prescribed these duties; I have received them
through education.  Moreover, how often does it happen that we are
ignorant of the details of the obligations that we must assume, and that,
to know them, we must consult the legal code and its authorized
interpreters!  Similarly, the believer has discovered from birth, ready
fashioned, the beliefs and practices of his religious life; if they
existed before he did, it follows that they exist outside him.  The system
of signs that I employ to express my thoughts, the monetary system I use
to pay my debts, the credit instruments I utilise in my commercial
relationships, the practices I follow in my profession, etc., all function
independently of the use I make of them.  Thus there are ways of acting,
thinking and feeling which possess the remarkable property of existing
outside the consciousness of the individual... Consequently, since they
consist of representations and actions, they cannot be confused with
organic phenomena, nor with psychical phenomena, which have no existence
save in and through the individual consciousness.  Thus they constitute a
new species and to them must be exclusively assigned the term social
[ital.].   It is appropriate, since it is clear that, not having the
individual as their substratum, they can have none other than society,
either political society in its entirety or one of the partial groups that
it includes - religious denominations, political and literary schools,
occupational corporations, etc.  Moreover, it is for such as these alone
that the term is fitting, for the word 'social' has the sole meaning of
designating those phenomena which fall into none of the categories of
facts already constituted and labelled.  They are consequently the proper
field of sociology.  It is true that this word 'constraint', in terms of
which we define them, is in danger of infuriating those who zealously
uphold out-and-out individualism.  Since they maintain that the individual
is completely autonomous, it seems to them that he is diminished every
time he is made aware that he is not dependent on himself alone.  yet
since it is indisputable today that most of our ideas and tendencies are
not developed by ourselves, but come to us from outside, they can only
penetrate us by imposing themselves on us.  This is all that our
definition implies.  Moreover, we know that all social constraints do not
necessarily exclude the individual personality..."

Well, there you have it.  Nowhere does the author deny that facts outside
the social sphere have an impact on society.  When an earthquake shakes
northeastern Turkey, it has a tremendous social impact, though we would
not attribute the earthquake itself to sociological causes.  At the same
time, when the earthquake kills an inordinate number of people because
of shoddy construction by greedy builders, we cannot explain this fact
with reference to geology alone.  As the last two sentences make perfectly
clear, the existence of social constraints in no way eliminates the impact
of individual personality (like the impact of human genetic makeup, the
impact of earthquakes, or the impact of the onset of entropy in
thermodynamic processes) upon society.  Therefore, the individualist (like
Jay's neoclassical economist), as well as the student of evolutionary
biology, or geology, or thermodynamics, has little cause to accuse the
sociologist of social determinism.

Note that the claims made above on behalf of sociology are quite different
from the claims made by one Jay Hanson on behalf of sociobiology.  In an
earlier post, Jay contended that "[i]t is not necessary to understand all
the complexities of the social world.  However, one should strive to
understand the biophysical principles that govern life of Earth."

Oh, and when was this piece of cutting-edge social science written?  It is
quite recent, so Jay not being up on it is hardly surprising.  The above
exerpt dates to 1897, and its author is one of the founders of sociology,
a fellow by the name of Emile Durkheim (see _The Rules of Sociological
Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method_, Free Press, 1982,
pp.50-52.)  This is a text commonly assigned to undergraduates as a
classic of sociology.

There is a truism that the natural sciences are more difficult to master
than the social sciences, and that natural scientists are more capable of
commenting on social science than vice-versa.  To a certain extent, the
truism is correct, because mastering the basics of the social sciences
does not require a knowledge of a technical language - the above exerpt
should be quite clear to anyone reading it on this list.  However, in
order to comment on the social sciences, the natural scientist (or anyone
else, for that matter) is expected to at least be familiar with its basic
texts and theories.  Now, Jay's credentials as a natural scientist have
already been put in question by people who are more qualified to judge
these matters than I am.  It should now be clear that his authority to
comment on sociology is basically nonexistent.

Yet, this fact does not stop Jay and other self-styled crusaders for
sociobiology.  In part, their chutzpah stems from the traditional
relationship between the natural and the social sciences.  The latter were
in the process of formation in the 19th century, that is, after the
natural sciences already had a series of successes behind them (yes,
natural scientific mentality is older, not younger,  than sociological
mentality).  In view of this fact, sociological method was explicitly
modeled on the scientific method, and throughout its history, has suffered
fromm somewhat of an inferiority complex vis-a-vis the natural sciences,
because it lacked the predictive power of some of the natural science
disciplines, and because it failed to deliver what some of its founders
(though not Durkheim) promised - a better functioning, more just and more
moral society.   

Things have changed a little since the mid-20th century.  The progress in
theoretical (NOT applied) science has slowed, since many of the
newer theories (e.g. superstring theory) have not been empirically
substantiated, and may be inherently unprovable (see Horgan, _The End of
Science_).  In addition, scientists now have difficulty in agreeing on a
single model (as they agreed on Newtonian dynamics prior to the turn of
the century).  All this has led to a state of affairs where people like
Prigogine, whom Jay cites in support of his idea of thermodynamics, have
called on the natural sciences to become more like history (see his _Order
out of Chaos_, with Isabel Stengers, Bantam, 1984).

In light of these developments, it is hardly surprising that many within
the natural sciences are longing for they day when their dominance within
the structures of knowledge was unquestioned.  The rise of sociobiology
represents part of this reaction, and reflects an effort to restore to
students of biology the right to authoritatively comment on the nature of
social processes, a privilege they have not had since the days of Herbert
Spencer's social Darwinism - a sort of forerunner to the sociobiology of
today.

Sociobiologists have frequently accused sociology of being socially
determinst, that is, of intruding on the turf better covered by other
disciplines.  To the extent that sociologists like Durkheim tried to
account for phenomena like religion in solely social terms, the accusation
of determinism is accurate.  But rather than correcting the error,
sociobiologists complicate it, for they not only assume that (e.g.)
religious mentality is reducible to social mentality, they collapse
social mentality into genetically heritable traits.  In this, they
actually recall Comte's Law of Three Stages (the succession of religious,
metaphysical and scientific mentalities in history, thus taking a 150-year
step backward and ignoring all the developments in social science since
Comte coined the term "sociology". 

 -- 
Boris Stremlin
bc70219@binghamton.edu