| Phi 109 Spring 2016 |
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Ronald Philip Dore (1925-) is a British sociologist whose own sociological research (on Japan and the comparative sociology of market economies) will not be very apparent in this philosophical discussion. Dore’s article is relatively long and the article by Steven Lukes we will discuss Thurs. is relatively short, so our discussion of Dore will likely continue on Thurs., particularly because Lukes will be arguing against views much like some of those that Dore advances.
Dore considers two main topics. The first, and the one he addresses most directly in the bulk of the paper, is the relation because explanations by causal laws and explanations of institutions by their function in societies. The second is the idea of “methodological individualism,” the view that facts about societies are best understood when they are reduced to facts about their individual members. This second topic, which is the one Lukes will focus on, is present, but in the background, throughout much of the paper and becomes really explicit only in the next-to-last section.
Dore’s discussion can be divided into two main parts:
• The first is a discussion of the relation between claims about the functions of institutions and claims about causal relations. This leads up to the “Summary” section (pp. 847f) and, in particular, to the two numbered propositions stated in it. Think through what they say and his arguments for them.
• The remainder of the paper draws lessons from these two claims. You will find Dore making a pair of claims also near the beginning of his last section (pp. 852f). These are closely related to the pair on p. 848 but are stated in somewhat different terms and in a reversed order.
One way of digesting this part of Dore’s paper is to think about the four types (a-d) of sociologist he distinguishes in the last section and the five “approaches” (“piecemeal,” “historical,” “static,” “model-system,” and “issue”) he outlines following them. Think which sort of sociologist would you choose to be, or to cheer on, and which sort of approach you would recommend—and, of course, why you would make these choices. Are there alternatives he has missed in either case?
Dore draws attention to the issue of methodological individualism in the section “Social Facts and Reductionism” (pp. 850-852). He actually begins his discussion of it just before this section by pointing to a mathematical analogy. If his notation is puzzling, you can take him to point to the difference between a sum of products of corresponding members of two series
(a1 · b1) + (a2 · b2) + …
and a product of sums of the series
(a1 + a2 + …) · (b1 + b2 + …)
and to suggest that this is analogous to the distinction between a summary of particular causal connections and a causal connection between abstractions that “sum up” particular facts. You will find Dore saying what he takes to be the connection between the issues of functionalism and methodological individualism later in the section, beginning just before its last paragraph.