Peter / Krauße / Preyer Thirty Years of ProtoSociology - Three Decades Between Disciplines

1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-3-7562-9704-7
Verlag: BoD - Books on Demand
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 38, 324 Seiten

Reihe: ProtoSociology - An International Journal of Interdisciplinary Research

The contributions to the "Thirty Years Volume" represented in this volume reflect the historical focus of the ProtoSociology project. Colleagues are represented who contributed to the focus. This is also true thematically, as contributions on language theory, the philosophy of the mental, and the sociology of contemporary societies are represented. The contributions to the "Thirty Years Volume" are definitely evidence that they address central research problems of ProtoSociology, regardless of their particular epistemological interests.

Dr. Georg Peter , Staff of ProtoSociology - the international journal and interdiszipinary project.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Peter, Georg

Krauße, Reuß-Markus

Preyer, Gerhard

Leseproben

EDITORIAL
AFTER THIRTY YEARS
Every past is transformed into a more-past, and again
Edmund Husserl 1. Initial situation When imagining long periods of time, we are overwhelmed with our current experience and they elude us. The past experience cannot be repeated in the present as a real event and the projective protentions can only be realized in the present. Thus, the present is the way to the future. This confronts us with the problem reference of time consciousness and time especially because the duration of thirty years of our project and journal Protosociology cannot be an object of a linear time consciousness. The term “ProtoSociology” goes back to Jürgen Habermas. He thus classifies phenomenological sociology, which goes back to Alfred Schütz and is inspired by Edmund Husserl. However, the term is not placed in this tradition. The term “ProtoSociology” is inspired in part by Paul Lorenzen’s constructive theory of language and science, which encouraged the project in its initial phase to establish a proto-theoretical approach in sociology. But the research program does not follow his epistemological fundamentalism of instrumental actions of measuring operations and his justification of intuitive logic. Therefor it is advisable to sketchily deal with the language-theoretical and sociological problems of ProtoSociology in the following. Another reason for these two branches, which seems to be rather separated nowadays, are found in the historical and biographical situation of the editor. So, the journal and the research project of ProtoSociology is motivated by the teaching activities of Gerhard Preyer in the second half of the 1980s. Its research program reflects the changing situation in philosophy and sociology at that time. Preyer’s sensitization for the treatment of philosophical problem references goes back to the teaching activities of Herbert Schnädelbach, with whom he studied after his first study of philosophy and sociology in the second half of the 1960s and in the first half of the 1970s. He also attended lectures and seminars in Heidelberg under Dieter Henrich and Ernst Tugendhat. In a collaboration with Michael Roth at the beginning of the 1980s, a first version of the problem situation of analytic philosophy was drafted, which was later further elaborated and somewhat varied. This was preceded by the treatment of the problem situation of the analytic theory of action with its peak in German philosophy in the 1970s. Rüdiger Bubner, Jürgen Habermas and Herbert Schnädelbach gave lectures on this topic. Analytic action theory was relevant to the project because the notion of logical form is a link between it, theory of action, language theory, sociological theory, and ontology. This is worth mentioning especially because the analytic theory of action was not adequately dealt with by sociologists working in the segment of sociological theory of action. It was the connecting element between the sociological and the philosophical aspects of our project. 2. The philosophical branch: from action theory to philosophy of mind and language In the beginning, the language-theoretical part of ProtoSociology was to characterize the sociological subject area by prototypical illocutionary acts, their conditions of interaction, and the privileged performance of illocutionary and propositionally differentiated language. The differentiation of illocutionary and propositional languages is the analysis instance of the structural extension of the society-internal communication. While this approach has taken a back seat to the substantive sociological research program of contemporary societies, it has not been abandoned. The language theory/philosophy projects have been pursued on an ongoing basis. The linguistic and speech act theoretical approach has been further supported by John Searle’s social ontology, but also by Noam Chomsky’s concept of language in the course of his turn to evolutionary theory and by insensitive semantics of Herman Cappelen, Ernest Lepore, and Emma Borg. However, it must be emphasized that no linguistic (ontological) idealism follows from this with regard to the social dimension and epistemology and ontology. A linguistic idealism was also not advocated in the language theory research program of ProtoSociology. The initial situation concerned language theory, for example, the semantic analysis of illocutionary acts and their typification and placement in an integrated theory of interpretation. It took up motives of the unified theory of thoughts, meaning, action, and evaluations von Donald Davidson. In the process, however, an intersection of the great debate in epistemology about “stimulus meaning versus distal meaning” (Quine, Davidson) of the 1980s, extending into the 1990s, also emerged. From this the conclusion was drawn to mark the link between the language theory and the sociological theory by the rationality assumptions. This motivated, for example, a project on concepts and theories of rationality. In the course of the work, however, it was concluded that the assumptions of rationality cannot guarantee the adequacy of the linguistic description of speech acts, inscriptions, actions, and communications. Jerry Fodor, Ernest Lepore, and Kirk Ludwig also came to this conclusion. However, the semantic systematization of the distinction of prototypical illocutionary act is not affected. Gerhard Preyer carried his criticism of the speech act theory once more at a conference at Rudgers University in September 2019. As a consequence of the reinterpretation of the unified theory, on which the projects of the ProtoSociology were pursued, it was obvious to reformulate continuously the problem reference of the link between mental, language, social and the rest of nature. The project was aided by the interpretation of Davidson and the critique by Ernest Lepore and Kirk Ludwig, and the reshuffling of traditional semantics to insensitive semantics by Cappelen and Lepore, and Borg. A conclusion from the projects was that the autonomy of meaning (Davidson) is not to be circumvented, and that one has to distinguish the theory of meaning from the theory of action and communication. Thus, the Grice mechanism and meaning nominalism cannot claim a central placement in language theory. A particular problem is how we analyse, for example, irony, metaphors, and insults in language theory and linguistics. Georg Peter has a special study on the problem of metaphor. The analyses of this problem continue to be of interest in the present discussion. 3. The sociological branch The sociological projects of ProtoSociology were motivated by the initial situation of the 1980s with its research program on the structural evolution of societal communication and societies. This concerned the confrontation with the tradition of systems theory, for example, Talcott Parsons, Niklas Luhmann, Richard Münch, and the debate between the approaches that place contemporary society in a development of modern society and the approaches, postmodernism, which diagnosed an incision and transition to a postmodern society in the history of modern society. Based on this, the sociological focal points were investigations and publications on globalization and the demands on corporate organization triggered by the transnational expansion of the economic system (economic globalization). In addition, there was research done on Weber’s sociology of religion, and the sociology of law. In contrast to the classical modernization theories of structural evolution the studies of Shmuel N. Eisenstadt show a relativization of the claim of Western modernization and a re-systematization of sociological theory as well. One application of the continuation of the Multiple Modernities research program has been our studies of Chinese modernization since the 1990s. Beside our two issues explicitly on China – and one on Japan – also five books have been published. It is evident that the institutional innovations and their order Western modernization have no generality. Eisenstadt’s general sociology is also informative for recasting social integration theory. This remains to be addressed. Reframing social integration theory is a focus of ProtoSociology’s research program, to which it has returned repeatedly. It is certainly one of the most difficult problem references, whose view in the publications of Gerhard Preyer and Preyer and Reuss-Markus Krausse are treated by many colleagues as very critical. Depending on the sociological point of view, this may be obvious. In the research program of recasting social integration, people kept coming back to the function, performance, and self-description of ascriptive solidarity. This is a problem that Gerhard Preyer already dealt with in his habilitation thesis (inaugural lecture 1984). In the course of the rewriting, a distancing from normatively oriented and universalistic approaches in the sociological tradition became increasingly apparent. With regard to this problem reference, Niklas Luhmann’s new version of the conflict theory through a social immunology should also be mentioned. This encouraged a conceptualization of social integration theory that was unusual in the history of sociological theory. Within sociological theory, we have observed widespread shifts over the past thirty years. They have been triggered by the structural change of contemporary societies. From the point of view of the different research programs in sociological theory, relevant publications have been made on this. They addressed the question of the sociology of the Next...