THE TENSION BETWEEN HUMANISM AND SCIENCE: SOCIOLOGY IN THE 1980s

Abstract

Although we talk a great deal about prediction as an aim of social science we practitioners of sociological science have never been very successful in peering into the future and seeing what is to be. Yet soothsaying is an ancient if not always honorable profession and I have incautiously rushed in by agreeing to accept the charge of this presentation. To save my rash action from being an empty performance I will try to use the format of crystal gazing as a device within which to raise some questions of theory and method which I believe are both persistent in sociology and reemerging now and in the coming years as central points of intellectual conflict. My theme is the recurrent issue of the image of human behavior and the metaphors or models which we sociologists use to study, understand and explain our subject matter. In my judgment the two models of a humanistic view of human action and a scientific one have continuously been offered. Each has been drawn from its own tradition, differing from the other in fundamental wa.ys. The Humanistic model has been drawn fro,m .literatur~, art, philosophy, and history, the scientific. rno_del .fro~ phySICS, biology and. chemistry. Science ·has stressed the deterministic character of cause-effect relationships and provided a methodology for discovering the operation of laws or propositions of human behavior. Humanistic studies have emphasized the self-conscious, selecting and unpredictable character of human action. Science has sought generalization; Humanism avoids it. Such models are, of course, dangerous and, especially for the