Referential and inferential reality. A rejoinder

J. Pouwer
1966 Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde  
A REJOINDER ani indebted to my colleague, Prof. Köbben, for his comment J which, by pointing up the comparison between them, serves to throw his own and others' scientific preconceptions into greater relief. He reveals himself (both in speaking and in writing) as a somewhat agnostic empiricist, and prefers (for the time being ?) not to go into the question on whether something called a social order can be said to exist or not. He creates one for himself by defining, classifying and comparing
more » ... se social phenomena that in principle can be tested by empirical methods and that are relevant to a specific question as thoitgh they were things. The consequences of the "choses sociales" postulate, which has governed so many scientific minds since Durkheim's day, are far-reaching. It causes the scientist to invest social phenomena, just like other things such as organisms, natural phenomena and chemical substances, with functions and a certain continuity and consistency. These three characteristics of the "thing" are prerequisites for the existence of more or less fixed functional rélationships between phenomena. In so doing, the researcher arrivés at the following type of conclusion: where A, there B; and, similarly, where not-A, there not-B. The analogy of this reasoning with the method used in the natural sciences -one which is just as much the result of a certain type of approach -is immediately apparent. For Köbben, as for his spiritual father, Radcliffe-Brown, who even went so far as to regard social anthropology as a branch of the natural sciences, there is only one scientific method. There are of course, as Köbben recognises too, gradual differences between the method used in the social sciences and that used in the natural sciences. The "as though" situation is even more evident in the study of social phenomena than in the natural sciences. Things do not coincide with their definition. Whether marriage, economics, law and religion are The translation is by Mrs. E. Wentholt-Haig.
doi:10.1163/22134379-90002946 fatcat:efpxqqp3hnecnodftuy56dgb4u