Sociological View of Reductionism

October 12th, 2007 Posted in Individual, Reductionism, Harry Houdini

Triad of Hierarchical Stones on New England Beach. Locals claim it has been in place for 10 million years. (above)

Old Line Journeyman Sociologist on the Way to His Lab. He still remembers seeing Talcott Parsons dance the Tango. (below)

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In our last post we found a wild-eyed fellow, who we called Charismatic Leader, tramping within the sociological reservation. Although soft-spoken, he is a rough-tough guy in action–overthrowing furniture, disregarding the local consensus and the law, setting up his own new way of being and doing. Some of the locals think he may have a connect with the ineffable. In any case he engenders love and trust and his program, while a little radical, excites and energizes the people. The golden aura around his head makes him hard to resist.

Now wait a second. Sociologists would run this man off the property pronto if he didn’t have an introduction from Professor Max Weber. Such a blithe person has no place in the land of sociology. We are not against change but we do insist that social change has to have a social cause. According to Professor Emile Durkheim we want the social facts, madam, and only the social facts.

A single person, for all we know a stranger from Mars, laying out a governing social pattern from no traceable source other than himself means we can derive the plural order by simply understanding his psychology.

This, my friends, is reductionism. It means that part or all of our social life ultimately resides within the psychic process of one concrete individual.

To make sure we are all tight with this reductionism business I’ll give you a dramatic example of it in action.

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WHAT IS REDUCTIONISM. A Start Toward Understanding HARRY HOUDINI DISRUPTS A SEANCE.

Harry Houdini wanted to believe in the spirit world and hoped for a message from his dear dead mother but his craft of illusion made him particularly sensitive to fraud. He is reported to have spent some time investigating the claims of living humans to contacts within the spirit world of the dead. The following is my reconstruction.

Houdini at work on his avocation, the critique of a séance–Witnesses and supplicants hold hands, forming a circle. The space blindingly dark. The medium calls to her contact in the beyond asking him to bring forward the shades of dead relatives of those present and then she channels the weirdly changed voices through. Meanwhile spooky noises, unexpected breezes, the eerie brush of a fingernail–all signs of the presence of the ineffable–fill the pitch black room.

Houdini jumps up; places match to candle; throws back a curtain and reveals the medium’s associates busily at work with fans and noise makers generating in a very physical manner what was supposed to come from the beyond. The game is up. The effects now seen as the result of a material show instead of an other-worldly process. The spiritual reduced to the mundane material.

Simple enough. People attend an event and are offered two ways of describing it. The behaviors observed in the sudden light suggest that one theory is more appropriate than the other. The issue is apparently resolved.

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However we must recognize two traditional realms of experience here. The Material consisting of things, events, processes available to human senses and the Ideal consisting of things, events, and processes available exclusively to human imagination or to the ineffable. The decisive test: If you can hear, see, touch, smell or by some derivative linkage of experiences you can establish a sensual connect it is empirical (material). If the connect is only through the imagination (beyond the empirical) the experience is purely ideal. Tests of fact by the advocates of the two realms differ: accepting only what the senses reveal versus what faith dictates. Houdini could only test the sources of physical manifestations—his senses assuring him that these are the result of empirical acts. But the spirit world is beyond him, especially if it offers no sensual handle. The reduction only involves the experience that is jointly covered by the two systems of explanation. But these two realms (material and ideal) are so mutually alien that no decisive jointly acceptable test exists. The old two-step of science and religion.

We are on more comfortable ground within the single realm of the senses. The tradition is to divide the empirical universe (which includes everything available to the senses including us humans from whence the scientists come) up into three parts or sectors–the physical whose study is physics, the living whose study is biology, and the plural whose study is sociology. Further tradition places these sectors in an ascending hierarchy based on evidence, as well as a presumption, of priority. So the idea of reduction that the earlier sectors will eventually explain the later is not alien. No one will be surprised when the physicists find a formula about a litlle bit of nanana-gizmo that explains everything.

So with Pauline representing sociology tied firmly to the track and the approaching train chugging toward her we promise to follow this story up next time.

And away we go.