The Fundamental Question of Sociology: In what sense is social science distinct from natural science at the same time as still being scientific? It cannot survive as an independent discipline if it is ultimately reducible to natural science, or to a mere humanistic study of arts and cultures, and so this fundamental question must be given one unambiguous and clear answer, to be agreed upon by members of all schools of thought in the social sciences with all their varying theoretical perspectives and practical interests.
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The question is not answered by an appeal to social theory or sociological method, for there is too much variation and ambiguity in these fields. All these approaches are primarily of value as techniques to be tried and tested in relation to sociological subject-matter, they do not give sociology a unified theoretical grounding.
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It is not answered by the historical approach to social science, for this approach tends to get tied up with making culture-relative claims that have no relevance to true science.
 It is also not answered by Gould’s distinction between the moral or religious realm of meaning and value, and the scientific realm of theories and facts. For this suggests that social science has to choose between being just like natural science, as in reductionism, or just like the arts and humanities, as in relativism. But I believe there is a unique place for true social science, akin to Durkheim’s conception of sociology as dealing with it’s own independent subject-matter of social facts with it’s own independent methods. But how are we to bring this conception together into a unified vision for sociology, which can be agreed to by everyone?
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The only way is to cut to the heart of the issue of the essence of science. To see why natural science had to fail, logically, when applied to sociological subjectmatter, and how social science, by adopting a different logic, can succeed in relation to sociological subject-matter.
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The failure of natural science when applied to society comes down to a key process that has two aspects. Firstly, natural science relies upon formal logic.
Now it is a common prejudice to state that formal logic is incontrovertible, due to its tautological nature, but this is due to a confusion in the use of the word necessity. Formal logic is a set of inferences that are necessarily related. The word necessity comes in merely as a relational term. However, many have come to use this term in a categorical sense, as if, to say something like, ‘A necessitates B’, is equivalent to saying ‘A entails B is a necessary truth’. The problem is that in formal logic we are not entitled to argue for the necessity of the overall proposition containing a logically valid inference, we are only entitled to argue for the purely formal claim that ‘A entails B’ is the same as ‘A is necessarily related to B’, not for the more substantial or categorical claim that ‘A entails B’ is the same as ‘A entails B is a necessary truth’. This latter mistakenly suggests that necessity is a category, rather than just a relation, and leads on the idea of a category of necessary truths called tautologies, which is simply not a legitimate claim within the formal logic. So then, if formal logic is not characterized by being ‘tautological’, a set of ‘necessary truths’, which it is obvious it cannot be in an era that rejects the foundationalist and realist epistemology, then what is it that

characterizes formal logic? Formal logic is determined by the kinds of inferences it makes, by the peculiar way in which it relates it’s terms. This all comes down to the notion of constitutivity. Formal logic is characterized by assuming constitutive relations universally apply between all the terms it considers. What this means is that given two terms with a set range of application to objects, things or phenomena, the formal logic seeks to determine if one term is constituted by the other. If it is, this is sufficient for the formal logic to be applied to these terms relation with each other. It does not require them to be identical, as would be suggested by the view of formal logic as a set of purely definitional truths or tautologies. But where does formal logic discover phenomena related in this way?
Precisely, peculiarly, and specifically in the natural sciences. E.g. This is the core of the Atomist epistemology, and it is the source of the drive to reductionism. A man is constituted by his body, a body is constituted by its organs, the organs are constituted by cells, the cells are constituted by atoms, etc… It applies the formal logic rigorously, claiming that from complete and exhaustive knowledge of what constitutes a bodily organ, say its cells, we can explain and account for the workings of the organ. But from whence comes this confidence? Some would say it is dogmatic reductionism, but this is not the case. They are merely applying the formal logic through to its logical conclusion. The confidence comes from the logic, and from the assumption that this style of logic can be applied to phenomena universally, because all phenomena are related constitutively as the formal logic requires. But, of course, we now know that this is not strictly the case. Yes, formal logic applies universally to those domains we identify as the subject-matter of natural sciences, but it does not apply to the domain of social sciences. Why not? It is actually quite a simple and obvious fact, once you understand the theoretical and historical background, and that is the fact that social phenomena are not related via the notion of constitutivity. My relation with my body may be constitutive, my bodies relation with its organs may be constitutive, etc… but this is because I am not in society with my body. But what of my relation with other humans, and with social institutions? Am I constitutive of them in this social phenomenon, or are they constitutive of me? The question simply makes no sense, because if there were such a constitutive relation between us, then it would be observed and treated as a part of natural science by the formal logic. But the very fact of stating that our relationship is non-constitutive either one way or the other is one and the same as stating that our relationship is a nonnatural one, and thus, in line with the differing logic governing relations of this type, we give it a different name classifying it as a social relation. But when we follow the genesis of this argument through we realize that stating the existence of a social relation is one and the same as stating that formal logic doesn’t apply to it.
In its second aspect, the key point is that all science must have a logic and the reason it must have a logic is because it must have a way of relating all the phenomena that come within its domain without interfering with them or influencing the way in which they relate, for this is the key to the neutrality and factuality we can set up in relation to our scientific observations. Now when the constitutive logic was falsely applied to social phenomena, it had the nasty

tendency of influencing the phenomena in ways detrimental to scientific investigation. Historically, the main example of this was the science of political economy, which didn’t end up merely describing how people pursued their selfinterest in the market, but ended up prescribing that people pursue their selfinterest in the market. Now, there is nothing necessarily morally wrong about this, for lines of action have to be prescribed somewhere in society, it is only the claim to scientific status here that was both wrong and dangerous, and had politically devastating consequences. Political Economy in the end was left in limbo, it couldn’t claim to be natural science, because it’s assumptions were not universal descriptions of human nature, but instead universal prescriptions to human nature.
But neither could it claim to be social science, because it insisted on relating its phenomena, and still does in economics proper, via the formal logic and its relational notion of constitutivity. So what we can learn from this, and much sociology has already learnt this, implicitly if not explicitly, is that in order that we may view social phenomena without inadvertently effecting the course they take, we must view them as related regulatively. Now this is primarily a negative notion relative to the formal logic, which will in it’s turn be replaced in the third aspect of the process of this argument by the positive notion of logic in social science. But we must first be clear to distinguish ourselves from natural science.
And this is achieved by adopting the regulative logic. This logic is basically the same as the formal logic without the ability to make inferences that assume the constitutivity of the phenomena being discussed. Thus, it is a pure logic of reasoning consistently amongst the social phenomena that we have defined. The problem for it, and its main weakness, is its lack of dynamism, its lack of illustrating how the defined social phenomena are interconnected, and how they relate to each other. This weakness is eminently observable in Weber’s use of ideal types in sociology, for instance. They allow us a clear and coherent understanding of social phenomena, they allow us to build up a picture of the overall cultural and historical context of society, but they give us no means of tapping in to the dynamic ways in which these social phenomena are interrelated.
They merely show us what is there, while providing only very vague hypotheses as to why it is there and how it got there, and where it is likely to go in the future.
This lack of dynamism in Weber, and in Durkheim, is something that needs to be improved upon, but this can only be done by moving on to a third aspect of this process, where we move beyond the failure of natural science to comprehend social phenomena, and begin to understand social science in a more positive manner in its own right, as an independently credible and autonomous scientific discipline.
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In its positive aspect the logic of social science starts from the principle of the identity of indistinguishables. Contrary to natural science and its vision of a grand abstract arena of space and time for all natural events to be placed within, in which two things may be identical except for the purely abstract difference of being in a different place, in social science if two things are in a different place within society or within the historical tradition of a society, then they are different not merely in the abstract, externalized sense of being in different places, but they are also different in some internally important sense. Now this historic specifity of

social phenomena due to the fundamental principle of their logic does not undermine the scientific comparison of societies, for they can be compared relative to ideal-types, which they approximate towards to different degrees, or they can be compared based on differences in their functional organization. What is ruled out, though, by this principle, is the experimental method of natural science in the sense of looking for laws of social change, since social phenomena are not repeatable based on their logic. Thus, at this stage we seem to be facing the same problem as before of the lack of dynamism in our understanding of social phenomena, but this is where we can now understand the fundamental and only logical sense in which we can have a dynamic understanding of social phenomena. There is no universal historical law of the progress of societies, and there is no determined course that social history must follow. Instead, what there is, is an implicit teleology underlying all social discourse, due to our own status as organized beings who pursue ends, such that whenever we utter something we do so unwittingly in the light of our whole social and historical context, so that all that we utter, tacitly and implicitly, acknowledges the orientation we have been provided with by our social background. When Weber talks of the Rationalization of society this is true in the sense of a dynamic unfolding of an implicit orientation to society, but it is not true in the sense of an objective process happening in the external world. When Spencer talks of the evolutionary progress of societies towards greater differentiation and integration, this is true in the sense that we, as organized beings, are bound in our society to be most interested in those areas where we are the most organized, and so we are teleologically bound to talk about these areas in the social arena. Thus, industry and technology take on such enormous social relevance to us, and so it is socially inevitable that they will acquire an intricacy and complexity transcending many other phenomena, simply because we are so focused in on these phenomena, and so see them in much more detail. These social phenomena are not more differentiated and integrated than others relative to some objective scale, but they are more differentiated and integrated than other social phenomena, past or present, universally for us humans, as social beings responding to current society. And so our teleological orientation in our society gives a universal and dynamic edge to the social processes happening around us. In which case, their universality is enough for them to be logically mapped in the logic of social science, even if they may amount to nothing in the pure objective world of natural facts. For this world, as is established by the adoption of the principle of the identity of indistinguishables, of space and time, has no hold over the social domain.