Lecture 1: Naturalism and Constructivism, and the Definitions of Theory
Key Concepts from Abend (2008)
- Ontological question
- The evaluative question
- Teleological question
- Semantic question
- Semantic therapy
- Semantic predicament
- Socratic error
- Theory 1 to 7
Naturalism
- Naturalism: example
- Naturalism: core assumptions
- Naturalism: four challenges
Naturalism: example
- Core topic of sociology is inequality (racism, sexism, homophobia) → How do we know that this
exists?
- As an example we look at discrimination in the labor market → Studies have shown that when a
non-white person applies for a job, they don’t get a response nearly as often as a white person from
the job.
- What makes these findings solid? Field experiments, also called the Golden standard of science,
which is an experimental method:
▪ If an independent x is present/absence, a dependent y is present/absence.
▪ It allows you to look at associations.
▪ High validity when it comes to supporting causal claims (does not make a causal claim!).
- The same thing happens in a field experiment, only this time the experiment is done in a natural
real-life setting.
- If you believe the outcomes of a study are real/true, then you are thinking within the branches of
naturalism. If you want to accept these findings, you need to understribe these by understribing
some naturalist assumptions.
Naturalism: core assumptions
Naturalism: direct access of the real world by your senses (what you see is what it is).
- Realism: there is a real world out there that exists independent of our experience → discrimination
in the labor market is a real thing that exists outside in the real world.
- Empiricism: we can get access to that real world by observing and thinking about it (reflection)
and recording our experiences → our eyes and our mind do not deceive us → through observation
we actually observe discrimination in the labor market as it really is (as a real thing out there in the
world).
▪ The combination of realism and empiricism forms the philosophical core of naturalism.
- That reality is patterned and structured → the discrimintation in the labor market is not a random
accident, there is something very fiber in the social reality/dimension that makes this occur in
reality and makes it visible to us.
▪ The observable world has regularities.
▪ The observed patterns imply causality.
- Experiments as method of choice.
▪ A combination of hypotheses testing, experimental or observational methods and the
theory of correspondence of truth.
▪ The aim of this approach is to make reliable causal statements (claims) about this world
(social reality).
- Separation between facts and values: the fact that afro-Americans are discriminated in the labor
market is not just an opinion, but a fact that is out there in the world, that exists independent of our
evaluation of it.
, ▪ It is not up to scientis to say it is a good or a bad fact, it is something we observe → we can
only make statements about facts that are true or false.
▪ Scientific facts are not matters of opinion → what our moral judgment about it is, should
be left out.
- Interested in general statements instead of ideographic statements → if racial attitudes occur in a
society it will lead to discrimination in the labor market.
▪ General statements (in physics even law-like statements) that can precisely describe and
predict the behavior of individual cases.
Naturalism: four challenges
1. Are social phenomena ontologically similar to natural phenomena?
2. Is the structure of reality patterned?
3. Can we directly perceive reality through our senses?
4. How do we address the concept of meaning?
Are social phenomena ontologically similar to natural phenomena?
- Those challenges relate both to the natural and social sciences, but we will only focus on the social
sciences.
- Rocks don’t talk back or have motives → does it make sense to speak cause and effect? It depends
→
- Thomas Theorem: “If people (originally: men) define situations as real, they are real in their
consequences. For example: in the 60th century when someone believed you’re a witch, it was likely
to get murdered → so there is this interpretation that has real-life consequences for individuals.
- The problem is that natural and social phenomena have different qualities.
Is the structure of reality patterned?
- The assumption is that there exists an ordered nature (ontology) → that there is a blueprint or a
bigger plan that governs the universe.
- A variant of this idea is the notion of a clockwork universe: it assumes that the universe is like a
mechanical clock and that it is the task of scientists to find out the mechanics of that clockwork →
once scientists have figured out how the clock works, they can predict how the universe will behave
with a 100% accuracy.
- Nowadays, there are not a lot of scientists that will understribe this for you, but at the time of
Newton they did, because it resonated well with the idea of a god who created the universe (people
were deep in religion). Once the idea of a god changed, the idea of a nature order faded away →
this doesn’t apply that there is not a real world out there, but we cannot know how it is structured.
Can we directly perceive reality through our senses?
- This is a problem of epistemological nature → the key aspect of naturalism is empiricism: the
assumption that our knowledge of the world is based on experiments → we have direct access to
the world via our senses of feeling, hearing, seeing, etc.
- An assumption related to this is that our mind is a blank slate/Tabula Rasa: people have no
knowledge before they have sensory experiences, but they do have the ability to understand
experiences independent of any context (other experiences or from social nature).
▪ This is based on naturalist assumptions.
▪ This (a blank slate) is not true → humans and animals have biological determent qualities
that affect how they understand the world.
▪ Scientists say that how humans experience the world is mostly determined by social
actions.
▪ Regarding sociology, we first need some sociological theories to be able to observe
sociological phenomena in the first place → it doesn’t make sense to say that the mind of
a sociologist is a blank slate (that it makes no sense to call someone a sociologist).
▪ So taking together our experiences of the world and the knowledge we have generated is
what we call theory related: based on a perspective and a type of question that you are
interested in → these factors all come together when it comes to understanding the world
around us.
▪ This makes it very hard to know the difference between observation and interpretation.
,How do we address the concept of meaning?
- It seems that naturalists leave no space for meaning and the ability to give meaning is central to
the human experience → Is it even possible to observe without taking meaning into account? For
example: when you stick up your hand you raise in a very naturalist way your index and middle
finger, but what this means cannot be known from this observation > things, gestures, and
symbols, can mean different things in different contexts → has to do with meaning giving process.
- The relevance of meaning has two implications for sociology:
1. The object of research.
▪ So, the central research area within sociology concerns the investigation of meaning and
meaning-giving processes.
▪ So, meaning giving is the object of research with itself.
2. The relationship between the researcher and the object of research → the object of interest is
also interpretative from some kind of meaning giving perspective or frame/reference from the
researcher.
Should we abandon naturalism?
- Is causally a fiction?
- Are social phenomena structureless?
- Is everything “just a social construct”?
➔ No, but we should be very careful when taking a naturalist stand on viewing the world as a
sociologist.
Constructivism
- What is the nature of the object of study?
▪ For example: does race exist?
▪ Race is misrecognized as a natural category.
- What is the relation between the researcher and the object of study?
▪ The big philosophical question regarding epistemology in the 16th century.
▪ David Hume’s skepticism.
▪ Kant’s approach: transcendental idealism
▪ How does this body work out in sociology?
▪ Bourdieu’s Reflexive Sociology
Constructivism
Constructivism: you have sense expressions, but your mind actively constructs these expressions.
- The general assumption is that reason or the mind plays an active role in the creation of knowledge
about the world. We are not passive observers.
- How does this work out in society?
1. What is the nature of the object of study?
2. What is the relation between the researcher and the object of study?
What is the nature of the object of study?
Example: does “race” exist?
- Naturalism: discrimination based on race in the labor market is real → is race a real thing that
exists independent of our minds? →
- Many sociologists point out that race is socially constructed → that something is socially
constructed does not imply that is not real.
▪ Remember the Thomas theorem: if people define situations as real, they are real in their
consequences.
▪ Burger & Lupman: some aspects of reality that we experience external to us as the same
matter as the natural world have a social origin → social construction means nothing more
than “made by people”.
- Things (categories, laws, institutions, etc). That we made up as species, we can experience as
external to us just like natural phenomena (weather, earthquakes, gravity).
, Race is misrecognized as a natural category
- Emirbayer and Desmond: race is the outcome of a historical social process of colonialism and
slavery in the US → race is misrecognized as a natural category.
▪ In everyday life the constant notions of race are experienced as real and have real-life
consequences.
▪ Racism has real consequences → it affects people's education, labor, and housing
market. So, race is something we made up, but the consequences are real.
- Concept and analytical tool versus object of study → for example: whether race as a concept
belongs to the analytical toolbox of the sociologist or a research object in itself.
▪ If we use the concept of race as an analytical tool, that would imply that we (sociologists)
should categorize people based on racial characteristics → conceptual and operational
problems (where do you draw the line between different racial categories).
- Sociologists see that racial categories are socially constructed; at the same time, they see that
they are real to people’s identities,
▪ Crucial point: as a sociologist, you do not deny that these categories are socially
constructed, but you do understand that they are real to people’s identities, and in that
sense, they have real-life consequences.
▪ Self-identification is always related to group identity: a part of your personal identity
depends on the social group with whom you identify → racial categories that you use in
your survey are social constructs that are out there in the real world, because that are
labels people identify with →
▪ Race is a real social construct out there in the real world, with real-life consequences
(positive and negative) → naturalist and quantitative research of race is possible, but need
to be sensitive to the fact that race is your object of research and not an analytical
instrument.
What is the relationship between the researcher and the object of research?
- How is this relationship seen in the naturalist's approach? Within the naturalist philosophy of
science, the relation between the knower and what can be known is direct and rather problematic
as it is based on the assumption that the real world out there, which we can observe, is how it really
is. However, things become problematic when we observe patterns in that work and try to use
general law-like statements on the basis of these observed patterns. The problem is that we can
never infer beyond our observations.
▪ For example: when a neighbor goes to his neighbor's house every time his wife leaves
home, your assumptions say more about your beliefs, etc. than about what’s really going
on.
▪ Empiricism is the way to absolute and universal knowledge.
The big philosophical questions regarding epistemology in the 16th century
- This still influences how we think about sociological phenomena nowadays.
- A big philosophical question regarding epistemology was: how do we come to know things?
1. The rationalists: true knowledge (especially mathematical truths) is a product of deductive
reasoning in the human mind.
2. The empiricists: all true knowledge comes from the senses and the rational mind is just a
processing tool.
- Kant tried to make a synthesis of the two positions → modified rationalism in such a matter that it
comes in line with the point of empiricists → he came up with a synthesis of the two positions.
▪ On one hand, our knowledge of the world is based on a sense of experience. On the other
hand, the structure and relationship of the knowledge that comes from reason.
▪ We have five ways to experience the world by senses, these capacities of our body
structure are experiences of the world and at the same sense there is the capacity of
reason. This consists of several necessary priority categories → the structures of the
mind: they structured a way in how we can conceive the world based on sensory input.
So, these categories structure what we can see and how we can see it.
Key Concepts from Abend (2008)
- Ontological question
- The evaluative question
- Teleological question
- Semantic question
- Semantic therapy
- Semantic predicament
- Socratic error
- Theory 1 to 7
Naturalism
- Naturalism: example
- Naturalism: core assumptions
- Naturalism: four challenges
Naturalism: example
- Core topic of sociology is inequality (racism, sexism, homophobia) → How do we know that this
exists?
- As an example we look at discrimination in the labor market → Studies have shown that when a
non-white person applies for a job, they don’t get a response nearly as often as a white person from
the job.
- What makes these findings solid? Field experiments, also called the Golden standard of science,
which is an experimental method:
▪ If an independent x is present/absence, a dependent y is present/absence.
▪ It allows you to look at associations.
▪ High validity when it comes to supporting causal claims (does not make a causal claim!).
- The same thing happens in a field experiment, only this time the experiment is done in a natural
real-life setting.
- If you believe the outcomes of a study are real/true, then you are thinking within the branches of
naturalism. If you want to accept these findings, you need to understribe these by understribing
some naturalist assumptions.
Naturalism: core assumptions
Naturalism: direct access of the real world by your senses (what you see is what it is).
- Realism: there is a real world out there that exists independent of our experience → discrimination
in the labor market is a real thing that exists outside in the real world.
- Empiricism: we can get access to that real world by observing and thinking about it (reflection)
and recording our experiences → our eyes and our mind do not deceive us → through observation
we actually observe discrimination in the labor market as it really is (as a real thing out there in the
world).
▪ The combination of realism and empiricism forms the philosophical core of naturalism.
- That reality is patterned and structured → the discrimintation in the labor market is not a random
accident, there is something very fiber in the social reality/dimension that makes this occur in
reality and makes it visible to us.
▪ The observable world has regularities.
▪ The observed patterns imply causality.
- Experiments as method of choice.
▪ A combination of hypotheses testing, experimental or observational methods and the
theory of correspondence of truth.
▪ The aim of this approach is to make reliable causal statements (claims) about this world
(social reality).
- Separation between facts and values: the fact that afro-Americans are discriminated in the labor
market is not just an opinion, but a fact that is out there in the world, that exists independent of our
evaluation of it.
, ▪ It is not up to scientis to say it is a good or a bad fact, it is something we observe → we can
only make statements about facts that are true or false.
▪ Scientific facts are not matters of opinion → what our moral judgment about it is, should
be left out.
- Interested in general statements instead of ideographic statements → if racial attitudes occur in a
society it will lead to discrimination in the labor market.
▪ General statements (in physics even law-like statements) that can precisely describe and
predict the behavior of individual cases.
Naturalism: four challenges
1. Are social phenomena ontologically similar to natural phenomena?
2. Is the structure of reality patterned?
3. Can we directly perceive reality through our senses?
4. How do we address the concept of meaning?
Are social phenomena ontologically similar to natural phenomena?
- Those challenges relate both to the natural and social sciences, but we will only focus on the social
sciences.
- Rocks don’t talk back or have motives → does it make sense to speak cause and effect? It depends
→
- Thomas Theorem: “If people (originally: men) define situations as real, they are real in their
consequences. For example: in the 60th century when someone believed you’re a witch, it was likely
to get murdered → so there is this interpretation that has real-life consequences for individuals.
- The problem is that natural and social phenomena have different qualities.
Is the structure of reality patterned?
- The assumption is that there exists an ordered nature (ontology) → that there is a blueprint or a
bigger plan that governs the universe.
- A variant of this idea is the notion of a clockwork universe: it assumes that the universe is like a
mechanical clock and that it is the task of scientists to find out the mechanics of that clockwork →
once scientists have figured out how the clock works, they can predict how the universe will behave
with a 100% accuracy.
- Nowadays, there are not a lot of scientists that will understribe this for you, but at the time of
Newton they did, because it resonated well with the idea of a god who created the universe (people
were deep in religion). Once the idea of a god changed, the idea of a nature order faded away →
this doesn’t apply that there is not a real world out there, but we cannot know how it is structured.
Can we directly perceive reality through our senses?
- This is a problem of epistemological nature → the key aspect of naturalism is empiricism: the
assumption that our knowledge of the world is based on experiments → we have direct access to
the world via our senses of feeling, hearing, seeing, etc.
- An assumption related to this is that our mind is a blank slate/Tabula Rasa: people have no
knowledge before they have sensory experiences, but they do have the ability to understand
experiences independent of any context (other experiences or from social nature).
▪ This is based on naturalist assumptions.
▪ This (a blank slate) is not true → humans and animals have biological determent qualities
that affect how they understand the world.
▪ Scientists say that how humans experience the world is mostly determined by social
actions.
▪ Regarding sociology, we first need some sociological theories to be able to observe
sociological phenomena in the first place → it doesn’t make sense to say that the mind of
a sociologist is a blank slate (that it makes no sense to call someone a sociologist).
▪ So taking together our experiences of the world and the knowledge we have generated is
what we call theory related: based on a perspective and a type of question that you are
interested in → these factors all come together when it comes to understanding the world
around us.
▪ This makes it very hard to know the difference between observation and interpretation.
,How do we address the concept of meaning?
- It seems that naturalists leave no space for meaning and the ability to give meaning is central to
the human experience → Is it even possible to observe without taking meaning into account? For
example: when you stick up your hand you raise in a very naturalist way your index and middle
finger, but what this means cannot be known from this observation > things, gestures, and
symbols, can mean different things in different contexts → has to do with meaning giving process.
- The relevance of meaning has two implications for sociology:
1. The object of research.
▪ So, the central research area within sociology concerns the investigation of meaning and
meaning-giving processes.
▪ So, meaning giving is the object of research with itself.
2. The relationship between the researcher and the object of research → the object of interest is
also interpretative from some kind of meaning giving perspective or frame/reference from the
researcher.
Should we abandon naturalism?
- Is causally a fiction?
- Are social phenomena structureless?
- Is everything “just a social construct”?
➔ No, but we should be very careful when taking a naturalist stand on viewing the world as a
sociologist.
Constructivism
- What is the nature of the object of study?
▪ For example: does race exist?
▪ Race is misrecognized as a natural category.
- What is the relation between the researcher and the object of study?
▪ The big philosophical question regarding epistemology in the 16th century.
▪ David Hume’s skepticism.
▪ Kant’s approach: transcendental idealism
▪ How does this body work out in sociology?
▪ Bourdieu’s Reflexive Sociology
Constructivism
Constructivism: you have sense expressions, but your mind actively constructs these expressions.
- The general assumption is that reason or the mind plays an active role in the creation of knowledge
about the world. We are not passive observers.
- How does this work out in society?
1. What is the nature of the object of study?
2. What is the relation between the researcher and the object of study?
What is the nature of the object of study?
Example: does “race” exist?
- Naturalism: discrimination based on race in the labor market is real → is race a real thing that
exists independent of our minds? →
- Many sociologists point out that race is socially constructed → that something is socially
constructed does not imply that is not real.
▪ Remember the Thomas theorem: if people define situations as real, they are real in their
consequences.
▪ Burger & Lupman: some aspects of reality that we experience external to us as the same
matter as the natural world have a social origin → social construction means nothing more
than “made by people”.
- Things (categories, laws, institutions, etc). That we made up as species, we can experience as
external to us just like natural phenomena (weather, earthquakes, gravity).
, Race is misrecognized as a natural category
- Emirbayer and Desmond: race is the outcome of a historical social process of colonialism and
slavery in the US → race is misrecognized as a natural category.
▪ In everyday life the constant notions of race are experienced as real and have real-life
consequences.
▪ Racism has real consequences → it affects people's education, labor, and housing
market. So, race is something we made up, but the consequences are real.
- Concept and analytical tool versus object of study → for example: whether race as a concept
belongs to the analytical toolbox of the sociologist or a research object in itself.
▪ If we use the concept of race as an analytical tool, that would imply that we (sociologists)
should categorize people based on racial characteristics → conceptual and operational
problems (where do you draw the line between different racial categories).
- Sociologists see that racial categories are socially constructed; at the same time, they see that
they are real to people’s identities,
▪ Crucial point: as a sociologist, you do not deny that these categories are socially
constructed, but you do understand that they are real to people’s identities, and in that
sense, they have real-life consequences.
▪ Self-identification is always related to group identity: a part of your personal identity
depends on the social group with whom you identify → racial categories that you use in
your survey are social constructs that are out there in the real world, because that are
labels people identify with →
▪ Race is a real social construct out there in the real world, with real-life consequences
(positive and negative) → naturalist and quantitative research of race is possible, but need
to be sensitive to the fact that race is your object of research and not an analytical
instrument.
What is the relationship between the researcher and the object of research?
- How is this relationship seen in the naturalist's approach? Within the naturalist philosophy of
science, the relation between the knower and what can be known is direct and rather problematic
as it is based on the assumption that the real world out there, which we can observe, is how it really
is. However, things become problematic when we observe patterns in that work and try to use
general law-like statements on the basis of these observed patterns. The problem is that we can
never infer beyond our observations.
▪ For example: when a neighbor goes to his neighbor's house every time his wife leaves
home, your assumptions say more about your beliefs, etc. than about what’s really going
on.
▪ Empiricism is the way to absolute and universal knowledge.
The big philosophical questions regarding epistemology in the 16th century
- This still influences how we think about sociological phenomena nowadays.
- A big philosophical question regarding epistemology was: how do we come to know things?
1. The rationalists: true knowledge (especially mathematical truths) is a product of deductive
reasoning in the human mind.
2. The empiricists: all true knowledge comes from the senses and the rational mind is just a
processing tool.
- Kant tried to make a synthesis of the two positions → modified rationalism in such a matter that it
comes in line with the point of empiricists → he came up with a synthesis of the two positions.
▪ On one hand, our knowledge of the world is based on a sense of experience. On the other
hand, the structure and relationship of the knowledge that comes from reason.
▪ We have five ways to experience the world by senses, these capacities of our body
structure are experiences of the world and at the same sense there is the capacity of
reason. This consists of several necessary priority categories → the structures of the
mind: they structured a way in how we can conceive the world based on sensory input.
So, these categories structure what we can see and how we can see it.
