A Comment on Developed Theory and Theory Development

Abstract

The occasion for this comment is the recent publication of Unified Three-Dimensional Framework of Theory Construction and Development in Sociology (Liao 1990). Its motive is broader, however. From the inception of the social sciences, essays either have recommended how scientific theory should be developed, as in parts of Marx's Grundrisse ([1857] 1973), or have evaluated the possibility of such development, as in Weber's Roscher und Knies ([1903] 1975). A few years ago a symposium of papers published in this journal discussed whether scientific laws and theory could be developed (DiRenzo 1987; Halfpenny 1987; Klein 1987; Turner 1987; Walker 1987; Zaret 1987). Like Liao, the writers in the symposium were concerned with the possibility of formal, scientific theory in the future. In 1990, at a theory construction conference funded by the National Science Foundation, six of eight papers focused on the failure of sociology to develop formal theory. These recent works commit a common error. All were written as if there were no body of scientific theory in sociology. On the contrary, use of formal, mathematical, and scientific theory is now a going concern in sociology-and has been for some years. Many sociologists are engaged in extending and applying this kind of theory every working day, and we certainly are not trying to hide it. Liao's paper, the papers of the symposium, and the conference papers all effectively ignore a substantial body of published work in which theory is built, applied, extended, and applied again. This is a substantial body of well-established practice. Herein lies an irony: some of the papers that ignore this growing body of work are written by people who are engaged daily in the work of theoretical sociology. Nor should this be surprising. Scientific theory of nontrivial scope has been so long in coming that some who engage regularly in theory work find themselves still defending it as a possibility. Although the theory construction movement can be traced to Merton's 1949 paper on middle-range theory, it gained direction in the 1960s and early 1970s, when a number of books were published purporting to explain how theory should be constructed. A partial list would include works by Dubin (1969), Gibbs (1972), Hage (1972), Reynolds (1971), Wallace (1971), Willer (1967), and Zetterberg (1963). This attempt to reform theory and theory use in sociology owed much to philosophers of science, particularly Popper and Hempel. There is a reason why so much was owed to philosophy of science, and as author of one of those works I can explain why. By rejecting the statistically based methods of sociology, we were groping for a theory-based method and looked to more advanced sciences for enlightenment. Unlike the social sciences with which we were acquainted, however, the more advanced sciences have no methods books. Not finding the methods books of more advanced sciences, we studied philosophers of science as surrogates.