2009 THE ANALYTICAL TURN IN SOCIOLOGY Hedstrom
2009 THE ANALYTICAL TURN IN SOCIOLOGY Hedstrom
2009 THE ANALYTICAL TURN IN SOCIOLOGY Hedstrom
President
Björn Wittrock, Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala
Former President
Eliezer Ben-Rafael, University of Tel Aviv
Vice Presidents
Ayse Caglar, Central European University, Budapest
Huang Ping, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing
Elke Koch-Weser Ammassari, University of Rome “La Sapienza”
Secretary-General/Treasurer
Peter Hedström, University of Oxford and Singapore Management University
Bureau Members
Alberto Gasparini, University of Trieste
Helga Nowotny, European Research Council (ERC), Vienna
Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris
Karen Cook, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA
André Béteille, University of Delhi
Auditor
Masamichi Sasaki, Chuo University, Tokyo
Frontiers of Sociology
Edited by
Peter Hedström
Björn Wittrock
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2009
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
ISSN 1568-1548
ISBN 978 90 04 16569 4
Peter Hedström
In his highly readable book, Dreams of a Final Theory (1993), the Nobel
laureate in physics, Steven Weinberg, discusses the role philosophy has
played in the development of physics. According to Weinberg little of
value has been gained by interacting with philosophers: “I know of no
one who has participated actively in the advance of physics in the post-
war period whose research has been significantly helped by the work
of philosophers.” Instead he gives a range of examples that show how
various philosophical dogmas, such as the positivistic one that theories
always must refer to observable entities, have hindered the development
of physics. The only somewhat positive influence he can discern is that
one philosophical doctrine sometimes has protected from the influence
of even more harmful ones: “The insights of philosophers have occa-
sionally benefited physicists, but generally in a negative fashion—by
protecting them from the preconceptions of other philosophers”.
Despite the fact that one could easily find examples of philosophical
ideas and philosophers that have negatively influenced the development
of sociology as a scientific discipline, I do not share Weinberg’s pessi-
mistic view. In fact, I believe that something which can be described as
an analytical turn in sociological theorizing is making certain branches
of analytical philosophy increasingly important for sociology.
Analytical philosophy is a rather heterogeneous field but a common
theme in most branches of analytical philosophy is the conviction
that many of the intellectual puzzles and problems we face are due to
ambiguities in our language. Once we express them with sufficient clar-
ity, they will become soluble or cease to exist. Hence most analytical
philosophers are interested in various forms of formal logic as a more
precise language than our natural languages.
Although the use of formal logic would seem to be of considerable
importance for sociology, it is rarely used. One important exception
is the ambitious book by Michael Hannan, Laszlo Polos, and Glenn
Carroll (2007) which uses logic to formalize various aspects of organi-
zational ecology. An important reason why they have turned to logic
is their belief that natural languages are not well suited for theoretical
332 peter hedström
integration, and, one of the major goals of their book is to show the
power of formal logic for theory integration in the social sciences.
Important as this may prove to be, logic is neither the area of
analytical philosophy that excites me the most, nor is it the area of
analytical philosophy that I believe to be the most important for the
development of an analytically oriented sociology. In my view, other
formalisms such as mathematics and computational modeling appear
to be more important for sociology than formal logic (see the chapters
by Breen and Edling for discussions about the role of mathematics and
computer simulation in sociological theory and research). What I find
particularly attractive in analytical philosophy is rather the general style
of scholarship as well as a number of specific conceptual clarifications
that are of considerable importance for sociological theory.
The style of scholarship one finds in analytical philosophy can be
concisely characterized as follows:
• typical actions, beliefs, desires etc. among the members of the col-
lectivity;
• distributions and aggregate patterns such as spatial distributions and
inequalities;
• topologies of networks that describe relationships between the mem-
bers of the collectivity; and
• informal rules or social norms that constrain the actions of the mem-
bers of the collectivity.
334 peter hedström
Macro: A D
Micro: B C
1
The segregation model in NetLogo version 3.1.4 has been used for these simula-
tions. See Wilensky (1998) for details.
the analytical turn in sociology 337
2
See Bruch and Mare (2006) for an interesting attempt to empirically test Schelling’s
model.
340 peter hedström
the macro-level patterns only, it is very likely that we would draw the
conclusion that because the society pictured in Figure 4 is so segre-
gated, those who generated its pattern must be much more prejudiced
than those who generated the pattern in Figure 5 even though the
individual-level differences between the individuals in the two societies
are in fact negligible.
This is a very important result that extends far beyond these stylized
examples: Macro-level outcomes and relationships tell us very little about why we
observe the macro-level outcomes and relationships we observe. Trying to make
causal inferences on the basis of macro-level data is highly error prone.
The reason for this is that the mechanisms that bring about macro-level
outcomes and relationships are not found at this aggregate level. We
must instead seek to make the transitions between micro and macro
levels as indicated in Figure 1 and as illustrated by the Schelling-type
of simulations.
Concluding Remarks
At least three important lessons can be learned from the stylized analyses
presented in the previous section:
References
• November 2004
• ISBN 978 90 04 13955 8
• Hardback (x, 574 pp.)
• List price EUR 151.- / US$ 225.-
• Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture, 4