Editor's Introduction: Language, Methodology, and the Sociologist

Abstract

I-The Recent Past Sociology is not without some traditional concern for the relationship between language and social research. turn-of-the century French school (among whose adherents, the best known to American sociologists was Emile Durkheim) seems to have been more influential in directing the attention of anthropologists to language than it has been among sociologists. One exception presents itself in the fascination C. Wright Mills apparently had with Granet's La Pensee Chinoise. Mills, however, did not choose to publish his analysis of Granet and it was left to Horowitz to retrieve the manuscript and include The Language and Ideas of Ancient China in his posthumous collection of Mills' works (Horowitz, 1963: 469-524).1 Systematic ground work on the rela tionship between language and patterns of thinking-a version of the sociology of knowledge?was pursued independently (and later, together) by Whorf and Sapir, but in sociology, aside from Mills' abortive effort, there seems to have been little interest. Borrowing a bit, I think, from Kenneth Burke, and a great deal from Charles W. Morris (whom he acknowledges), Mills defines a special field within sociology: sociotics. And it is to this area of sociotics that this issue of SOCIOLOGICAL FOCUS is addressed. By the term Sociotics I mean to demarcate for analysis (a) all the sociological phenomena that are involved in the functioning of language; and (b) the ways by which lingual phenomena channel, limit, and elicit thought. Sociotics is at once a portion of theory of language and a division of sociology of knowledge. (Mills in Horowitz, 1963: 492).2 But Mills is also part of a more enduring traditional concern with language in sociology. He finds language to be a link in the