for a sociological philosophy

For a sociological philosophy

RANDALL COLLINS Dept. of Sociology, University of California, Riverside

Philosophy in the late twentieth century appears to be in a time of transition. The Anglophone world is no longer dominated by the analytic and positivist schools, at least not in the constricting form that held sway in the decades around mid-century. On the Continent, a succession of modish philosophical movements have displaced one another over the last decades, leading up to the self-questioning of current Postmod- ernism. Though today's philosophers are heirs to many themes and techniques of previous generations, the mood has shifted. The enemies of the dominant schools of thought are no longer the same, and the structure of intellectual alliances and the field of creative possibilities has shifted accordingly.

It is my contention that we sociologists can and should play a role in this new epoch of philosophy. In one sense, philosophy is already leaning our way. It is widely accepted that questions of knowledge, of science, of intellectual discourse in general, are grounded in a social context. Yet philosophy has not made the transition from the social to the sociological. Philosophers invoke the social in a general and taken- for-granted way, while their use of actual sociology is meagre and often uninformed. I will suggest that sociological theories provide some powerful arguments within the core of philosophy itself. Sociology can cut through some knotted issues, not only in epistemology and ethics (where philosophers are already leaning in our direction) but in metaphysics as well.

For all that recent epistemologists tend to accept that knowledge is social, sociology itself is not regarded as having any knowledge content. This is no conundrum. It is not merely that sociology has a poor image in the larger intellectual field. Part of the motivation within philosophy for asserting the social nature of knowledge is to deny the objective or

Theory and Society 17: 669- 702, 1988 �9 1988 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands

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at least demonstrable nature of knowledge in general. The social grounding of knowledge is a way of arguing for historicity and, generally speaking, relativism. As an anti-positivist ploy, the social is invoked, not to bring in the aid of sociologists, but to exclude any aid whatso- ever. Nevertheless, having created an opening for us on their intellectual turf, philosophers should not complain if we move in with more than a phantom presence.

The point cuts in the other direction as well. I am arguing for a sociological philosophy; at the same time, a philosophy of sociology also seems promising. Sociology is a terrain for considering the underlying conceptual structures, and the knowledge claims, of some of the deepest and most complex issues anywhere in the intellectual world. The micro-macro issue, the nature of the self, the nature of social causes and explanations are just such issues. Granted, at least some such issues were already treated in the previous intellectual generation, but under the narrow aegis of positivist doctrine and in the rather authoritarian mode of "methodology of social science" The new open- ness of philosophy, as well as a shift in the contents of sociology (e.g. from the problems of functionalism to the micro-macro issue) makes this an auspicious time to begin again. As we will see, though, a polemi- cal anti-positivism will not serve us well either. If today's philosophy/ sociology nexus is to be a fruitful one, we need to get beyond debating with the ghosts of the positivist generation. Ideas are framed by one's opponents as much as by one's own vision of the possibilities; and today's fashionable anti-positivism is weighted down by the carcass it feels compelled to drag around with it. Fortunately, both sociology and philosophy have new resources of their own.

One more twist. There are possibilities not only for sociological philosophy, and for philosophy of sociology, but also for sociology of philosophy. The last is not a form of philosophy at all, but is simply another area of empirical sociology. It is a branch of the sociology of science, 1, which happens to take philosophers and their productions as a topic to study, in the same way that sociologists have looked at bio- chemical laboratories or compared astronomers' research teams. Not much has been done in this area as yet. 2 I bring it up in this context because the sociology of philosophy occupies a reflexive position in regard to the questions I have just mentioned. The very reasons why philosophy is now in a new intellectual configuration, and why the relations between the two disciplines have their peculiar form, are questions that can be answered in the sociology of science/sociology of phi-

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losophy. To pursue this purely on the level of "sociology of ", of course, would be to move the whole inquiry to another level; it would bracket the substantive points mentioned above, and divert attention from the kind of constructions within philosophy and within substantive sociology that I am trying to motivate. But there is nothing to pre- vent us from acting with clarity about the different kinds of projects we are carrying out, and working both in the sociology of philosophy, and in the substantive border-crossings between the two fields that I call philosophy of sociology and sociological philosophy.

It is possible deliberately to combine all these modes: the sociological analysis of philosophy, with the consideration of substantive issues that arise within philosophy and within sociological theory. This meshes with the issue of levels, of '~frames" in Goffman's terminology, of "reflexivity" in Garfinkel's. Philosophy itself has wrestled with this issue, ever since the paradoxes and methods associated with Frege and Russell at the turn of the century, later centering around GSdel's proof and the philosophy of mathematics. But it seems to me that the nexuses between sociology and philosophy are particularly important grounds on which to confront this reflexive issue. If knowledge (or discourse in general) is social, then sociology should be in the most important position to reflect on the nature of philosophy as a form of knowledge or discourse. The issue is complicated by the fact that philosophy itself is a foundational, or at least grounds-exploring, discipline, and hence philosophy is also reflexively applicable to sociology. We have a problem not merely of boxes within boxes, but of two shells each of which might claim to frame the other. This puzzle, I suggest, is not something to cause us to throw up our hands, but something to be explored. With the aid of a sociology of reflexivity (Goffman, Garflnkel, the vantage point of a sociology of philosophy), we can work on the problem in a fuller context than the abstract formalisms on which Russell and GSdel focussed; here sociology should take us further ahead in understanding the multi-level nature of reality.

In what follows, I first sketch out the movement of intellectual camps in twentieth-century philosophy that have led up to our current position. Obviously nothing very complete or definitive can be attempted here. I will pay most attention to the Anglophone viewpoint, and to Continen- tal philosophy mainly as it comes into counterpoint (largely antagonistic) with it. My emphasis will be on how one might proceed with a sociological account of these intellectual movements. Though little has been done on the sociology of twentieth-century philosophy, it is ap-

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parent that typical processes found elsewhere in the sociology of science have been operative here, including both the internal structure of factional manuever as intellectuals make their careers across generations in the intellectual field, and the external context of religious and political movements in the larger society as they impinge upon the intellectual world. This sketch of a sociology of philosophy gives grounds for some concluding reflections on the nature of philosophy generally as a distinctive turf within the intellectual field. This in itself has epistemological significance, if it can display the nature of knowledge at its most reflexive level. I further inquire into the possibility that sociology might play an increasing role vis-h-vis substantive problems throughout philosophy.

Four philosophical generations from idealism to post-positivism

Perhaps the most visible sign of our times is the breaking down of the barrier between Continental and Anglo-American philosophies. A generation ago, the existentialists, phenomenologists, indeed the entire Continental tradition back to Hegel and before, were generally treated with derision across the Channel and the Atlantic. Today the traditions are being mixed to an almost astounding degree. Richard Rorty -a claims his great inspirations are Wittgenstein. Heidegger, and Dewey. and makes a big splash. More substantively, Robert Nozick 4 actually takes up such issues as the meaning of life, and the question that Heidegger claimed is the most fundamental, and most neglected, in metaphysics: why is there something rather than nothing? - and tries to solve them by invoking Zen, the Atman of Hindu cosmology, and the logical calculus of the analytic establishment. Charles Taylor s and others pump for Hegel, unmediated by Marx. And everywhere in the United States today we see the vogue of Parisian structuralist/poststructuralist/ deconstrnctionist terminology. On the other side, Habermas has imported Mead and Austin into the tradition of Schelling and Hegel, while Peirce has become something of a fad throughout the Continent. Some underlying fault-lines of the intellectual field are shifting.

The onset of the Anglo-American versus Continental split goes back to the turn of the twentieth century, four intellectual generations ago. As the English and American universities were gradually liberated from religious control in the 1870s through the 1890s, a transitional generation of Idealist philosophers came to dominance. 6 This movement included Green, Bradley, Bosanquet, and McTaggart in Britain, and its

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influence lasted through the Idealist metaphysics of Samuel Alexander and Whitehead in the 1920s. In the United States a similar Idealist movement included Royce above all, the early Dewey, Peirce in some respects, and a host of lesser figures -- a movement whose followers were still strong almost until World War 11. 7 The generation that came of age about 1900, including Russell, Moore, and the early Wittgen- stein, broke sharply with this metaphysics. In effect, they were com- pleting the move to secularization: Idealism, as a halfway house to traditional doctrinal religion, was to be driven out and replaced by scientific philosophy. 8 The elder, late-nineteenth-century generation that Russell, Moore, and their followers were rebelling against consisted of neo-Hegelian Idealists. The analytic movement of the early twentieth century was a kind of nativist purge, getting the alien Continental philosophies back out of the land of science and common sense.

To define the Continent as the land of metaphysics and Britain as the home of commonsense empiricism, of course, was a reconstruction of history in the interests of contemporary intelllectual ideologies. Even aside from the turn-of-the twentieth-century Idealisms, the British scene had included extreme religious metaphysics like that of Berkeley, while the Continent had its own versions of militant positivism. The world of philosophy, despite the local strength of particular schools, was quite international up through Russell's own generation; Russell himself had sojourned in Germany, and his resources for recon- structing British philosophy drew upon Frege's new formal logic as well as Continental developments in the foundations of mathematics. The Continental/Anglo split that has characterized the twentieth century had to be created. The forces that did so were partly internal to each philosophical community (but nonetheless sociological, insofar as they involved a struggle for power inside that community); partly external, in the sense that the larger political context came to motivate and reinforce a divison between two polar styles of philosophy, and to identi- fy each with a geographic homeland.

Moore and Russell were forging a militantly anti-metaphysical, proto- "analytical" philosophy in the years before World War I. But the Anglo/Continental break was not yet firm. Indeed, the next phase of the battlefront between two styles of philosophy shifted briefly during the late 1920s and 1930s to the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, and its outliers and sympatheizers in Berlin, Prague, and Warsaw. Here, the external context affecting philosophy did not have the same polari- ty as in Britain and the United States, where the underlying issue was

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one of how much concession was to be made to religious philosophy in the form of Idealism. On the Continent, the battles over the place of religion in the universities had been fought much earlier. The triumph of autonomous, secular scholarship in the German universities around 1810 had constituted the model for the modern university structure that other national systems were adopting in their own reforms down to the end of the century. 9 Hence the Germanic universities of the early twentieth century were not battling over the place of religion within them, and the issue of quasi-religious philosophy was not the same concern as it was in Britain and America.

But the Germanic intellectual world of the 1920s had another conten- tious external context for philosophy. In this case, there were powerful political movements directly allied with intellectual positions. No- where, perhaps, were these divisions more intense than in Vienna. The Vienna Circle was a stronghold of Social Democrats, opposing the conservative romanticism of current Germanic culture) ~ Logical positivism, among other things, was an onslaught on any vestiges of romanticism in their own discipline of philosophy. Heidegger was attacked, upon publication of Sein und Zeit in 1927, by the Vienna Circle as a horrible example of the romanticist philosophy they opposed. The most militant statements of Vienna positivism date from just after this time; the efforts to formulate a verifiability criterion or more generally to tie meaning to truth-conditions, were explicitly directed toward excluding metaphysical constructions like those of Heidegger. The conflict with Heideggerian phenomenology was one of the driving mechanisms in the development of the positivist school. This should not be surprising, given the general importance of conflict in paradigm change generally, n

This is not to say that logical positivism did not have its own prior roo t s ) 2 Mach, writing as a physicist before the turn of the century, had proselytized for an anti-theoretical orientation within the sciences; Schlick (a successor to Mach's chair at Vienna) had organized an informal discussion group in 1924 that eventually proposed to call itself the Ernst Mach Society. Schlick was a physicist, who had trained under Max Planck, and later had migrated into philosophy; by 1918, he was stressing the verifiability of scientific theories. Carnap, who had studied mathematics with Frege at Jena and corresponded with Russell, had written his reductionist program already in 1924. But the crystalization of a formal, self-conscious movement known as the Vienna Circle did not take place until 1928. It is from this time that

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intense philosophical developments took place, as the group struggled within itself to make philosophical capital out of its basic stance. 13

The most extreme anti-metaphysical movement thus reached its peak in opposition to the movement of engag6 metaphysics in existentialism. Here we see internal conflict among factions, defending their turf within the intellectual field, reinforced by external political alliances. Heidegger's opportunistic dallying with the Nazis after they took power in 1933 helped further reinforce his negative image in the Anglo- American camp. But this did not remain simply a matter of Left versus Right. Although some of the Vienna Circle (especially Neurath, its most militant spokesman) had Communist sympathies, they were more likely to be sympathizers of the moderate socialist side. After the con- servatives and then the Nazis came to power in Austria during the mid- 1930s, most of the Circle fled to Britain and America, where the political mood was much more exclusively centrist/liberal.

Anti-extremism became the political order of the day. The fact that Husserl was a Jew, and that Sartre and the French existentialists were intensely involved in the anti-Nazi Resistance, did not mitigate their image among the professional Anglo-American philosophers. Probably the leftism of Sartre and French philosophers generally gave them dis- creditable political overtones in America during the height of Cold War anti-Communism. Polemicists like Popper tarred them, along with everyone else, with the brushes of "extremism" and "irrationality." Popper had originally been a sympathizer of the Viennese left, and although not admitted to the Circle itself was closely connected with the militant positivist faction around Carnap. At the time of the anti- Nazi emigration, he became the most strident expositor of the political implications of the philosophical battle, a kind of extremist of the center; his writings during the Nazi/World War II era explicitly equate his positivist falsification doctrine with democracy, and non-scientific philosophies with totalitarianism. Since the Vienna positivists migrated en masse to Britain and the United States (except for Schlick, who was assassinated by a right-wing student), the effect of this political conflict on the Continent was to reinforce and extend the anti-Continental polemic in Anglo-American philosophy. Though the native-born analytical movement was less strident than the positivists, and disagreed with its extreme emphasis upon a scientific criterion of knowledge, nevertheless the analytic/positivist coalition had its strongest boundary against their common external enemies.

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When the external context changed in the 1960s, it washed away sev- eral of the underpinnings of this anti-Continental mood. The breaking down of the Cold War, the anti-nuclear movement, and the general shift to the Left during the period of the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War mobilizations, transformed Continental intellectuals from enemies into allies. There is also an effect of the career transition among intellectual generations. The first generation of analytical, anti-metaphysical philosophers (Moore, Russell, et al.) was grounded upon a struggle with well-situated philosophical rivals: the Idealists. Once the Idealists were gone, much of the point of the intellectual battle was past. The next generation of philosophers (Carnap, Ayer, the later Wittgenstein, and the analytical/ordinary language movement), although inheriting their cultural capital from their elders, no longer had the same motivation to pursue the attack. This is equivalent to saying that career oppor- tunities no longer were organized in the same direction. One could not follow the same strategy to make a name for oneself. Attacking the Idealists by extolling scientific or commonsense philosophy was beating a dead horse; it was still done, of course, but consigned one to the backwaters of the intellectual field.

The Nazis and the Cold War were a godsend, so to speak, for the analytical/positivist cause, because they provided new, live enemies upon whom the old intellectual ammunition might still be directed with good attention-getting and career-building effects. But there was something strident and artificial about the second generation analytical/positivists. Their strongest justification was external to the intellectual world: virtually everyone hated Nazis (and for a while most people in the West were either fearful of Communist totalitarians or of being branded one of them); but to apply this mood to put down internal opponents of the technical positivism in the academic world -- advo- cates of metaphysics, or of literary stylistics, or of a fresh breeze beyond scienticism and common sense -- smacked of arm-twisting. This is one of the reasons why, when the external props fell away in the 1960s and 1970s, there was such a mood of vehemence, even vindic- tiveness, against the analytical/positivist Establishment. And not merely in philosophy: in the social sciences above all, but pretty widely across the board in academia, a narrow methodologizing positivist spirit had been reinforced by the mid-century political mood. Hence much of the intellectual side of "the 60s" (i.e. really the period between 1964 and 1975 or 1978) was a joyful seizing of the opportunity to revolt.

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External forces of the 1960s: student politics and the counterculture

We are still too close to the 1960s, perhaps too emotionally involved with its currents, to have a good sociological understanding of what happened in that period. Most obviously, it was a time of political shift radically to the left, an international outbreak of student politics inter- twining with other social movements (the civil rights movement in the United States, later the feminist movement, a showdown of class forces in France. . . and many other particulars). It was also the time of the Counterculture, psychedelic drugs and freeing your mind, mystical reli- gions, hippie communes, sexual liberation, and a stylistic change -- longhaired men, women in pants -- that amounted to a "Goffmanian revolution" against traditional styles of deference and demeanor. It was a time of rebellion across a wide front, and it should not be surprising that intellectually its concomitant was a vehement rejection of the intellectual dogmas of the elders, including science and positivist/analytical philosophy.

These were external conditions, insofar as they set a surrounding atmosphere; but nevertheless there still remained the inner networks of the intellectual world itself, in this case the professional philosophers, whom one would expect to go on pursuing their careers using their internally cumulated intellectual capital. Dropping out and joining the Counterculture just meant leaving the intellectual field; a few intellectuals, mainly young university faculty, tried to preach the Counter- culture from the lecture hall, but they rarely lasted more than a year or so. Nevertheless, despite the insulation of the professional network in philosophy from external forces, there are reasons for seeing the two levels as more deeply connected in this case. That is because, I would suggest, the underlying causes of the student political movement, and the drop-out Counterculture movement, were themselves connected to a structural transformation that was going on in the universities.

To state the hypothesis briefly: the 1960s political and Counterculture movements in the United States were basically movements of students at a time when the higher education had been rapidly expanding, reaching a level of mass enrollments that was eroding the status value of the college degree) 4 Credential inflation was widely apparent. For a time it seemed as if we were heading for near-universal college education, eliminating its social distinctiveness and making the B.A. nothing but another step toward increasingly extended and specialized graduate

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training. I believe it was this atmosphere of the sinecure society that accounted for so many features of the sixties: the feeling that we had arrived at a society of leisure and the end of serious work; the rapid decline of intellectual standards, and the explicit rebellion against what was seen as the arbitrary imposition of scholastic hurdles by an entrenched elder generation; the mood of dropping out and cultural rebellion; and also, on the explicitly political side, the availability of masses of students with the resources to mobilize for idealistic causes in the surrounding world (the issues of racial discrimination, the Vietnam war, gender bias). In the case of the civil rights movement, the original mobilization was fueled by black college students, who themselves had become a large group for the first time through the expansion of black higher education.

The very expansion of the higher education system gave the resources on which these movements could mobilize. The most militant and com- mitted of the student radicals, as I recall, were graduate students: seemingly risking their careers, but at a time when the market for college teachers had been rapidly expanding, and the atmosphere was one of taken-for-granted economic security. It was a movement, then, based above all on the universities, even as it rebelled against them. But is this so surprising? The larger goals -- to end the Vietnam war (or war in general), to overcome racism, to bring about social equality -- were beyond the means of the student movement alone; attacking traditional university practices was closer at home, and gave at least some oppor- tunities for success, the little victories needed to keep up a sense of momentum.

The situation in Europe was somewhat different. It was not a case of accelerating credential inflation within an already massive system as in the United States; instead, most of the European (including British) university systems had been small and tight elite establishments, and the 1960s was a period of educational reform opening them up to moderately sizable middle-class participation. 15 The immediate on- campus goals of the European student movements -- to open up the class basis of universities -- were thus different than in the United States. But what affected the larger mood of those times was simply the fact of student mobilization. In all countries, the student movements tried to join with whatever local movements of political upheaval happened to exist. Movements tried to feed off each other. It was also a time of international emulation, with the student movements following developments in each other's countries. In this way the American stu-

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dent movement and its Counterculture/psychedelic ideology became for a while an international style-setter -- perhaps, ironically, an opening wedge for the Americanization of popular culture in Europe.

As I have said, the professional core of the intellectual world was insti- tutionally insulated from all this. But influences could not help from seeping in. The university Establishment, the full professors in place in the 1960s and early 1970s, were for the most part openly hostile to Counterculture challenges to the specific content of their own discipline; but many of them (particularly the younger faculty) were nevertheless caught up in at least some of aspects of mobilization -- especially the political crusades of the time. By the 1970s, some of the professional philosophers were making an explicit connection between their own work and its political implications. John Rawls 16 used analytical philosophy to put forth a theory of justice that in effect spoke on behalf of the civil rights movement. Nozick 17 put forward an anarchist political philosophy; this took a neo-conservative direction, but that is not so incongruous, insofar as the American student movement was not so typically socialist as anarchist or anti-political. Within technical philosophy, Nozick TM went on to argue for a cognitive anarchism, refusing the tyranny of the claim of "truth" by any hegemonic theory. The lead in this direction was taken by Feyerabend, 19 who explicitly identified with the Counterculture, and used to lecture publically in defense of occultism as having equally valid claims to truth as science. It is out of this atmosphere that we have arrived at currently popular positions such as that of Rorty, 2~ taking the historicist and relativist line, declaring that all sciences and all philosophies are products of a particular set of concerns and preconceptions, with none taking ultimate precedence.

The social significance of intellectual styles

The prevailing tone of mid-century analytic philosophy was technical and dry-as-dust; as a commentator once said, "a dreary kind of philosophy done under a low and leaden sky. "21 It was a generation whose leaders explicitly set out to kill metaphysics and other "grand questions," and who either wanted to abolish philosophy entirely or turn it into a specialized science. Graduate students were drilled in symbolic logic as their rite de passage into professional status (the way sociology students were drilled in statistics -- and still are), and for a while it looked as if nothing but the narrowest technical idiom would prevail.

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As a sign of the times, there has been a stylistic upheaval. Not a revolution -- the analytical techniques are still very widespread, and in some quarters remain in absolute control. But even among those who use them, the formal techniques have become blended with a style that goes almost to the opposite extreme. The tone of much philosophical writing today is deliberately cute, even flippant. Nozick probably wins the crown with such sallys as:

I, too, seek an unreadable book: urgent thoughts to grapple with in agitation and excitement, revelations to be transformed by or to transform, a book incapable of being read straight through, a book, even, to bring reading to stOp. 22

Elsewhere he gets downright spacy, invoking in the midst of a metaphysical argument the Beatles' cartoon movie The Yellow Submarine, in which a vacuum cleaner sucks up everything in sight, including the background, then sucks itself up until the scene reappears with a pop. 23 David Lewis perhaps does him one better in the spaciness game, writing a whole book to defend the real existence of all possible worlds, including those of spirits or auras or deities, and those in which the laws of physics are different from this one. 24 Lewis's book is studded with cute and clever phrasings, such as the label of "Ersatzism" for one version of his opponents, and features such headings as "Arbitrariness Lost?" and "The Incredulous Stare" The whole possible worlds literature has not only a science-fiction atmosphere but a propensity to this kind of playfulness, coming up with such titles as "How to Russell a Frege-Church" and "Lewis' Ontological S l u m . ''25

Is all this (and other instances like them) a reflection of the hippie/ psychedelic era of the sixties and seventies a kind of philosophical version of the counter-culture? One might instance Michael Dummett, who in addition to his technical work in the philosophy of mathematics, wrote a long book on the Tarot. This is not to say the philosophers whose writings constitute the intellectual epoch at hand were themselves young dropouts; many of them are older, and many of these works appeared long after the flower-children had faded from the land. But intellectual work is long in gestation and publication, and we should not rule out the influence of "the sixties" as a background influence or conjuncture. It provided delegitimating and relegitimating energies that could be harnessed to the inevitable conflict of generations as a new crop of intellectuals struggled to make their marks against the intellectual terrain of their elders.

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Thus, the literary, even flippant, style of the new leaders is nevertheless mixed with many elements of the older philosophy. Nozick, Lewis, Kripke, Rorty, and others were trained in symbolic logic, and they use it, sometimes quite frequently, even in the same passages where they are being most far-out. Substantively, too, they continue lines of thought already laid down in the previous generation. All this is to say that they are professional philosophers, trained within the citadel, and recombining their inherited cultural capital in ways that Challenge and extend the familiar, while yet being attached to the core that ensures one the maximal focus of attention from a professional audience. Some elements of stylistic freakiness were already there in the earlier period. Berna rd Wil l iams z6 could introduce into philosophical argument about personal identity science-fiction-like fantasies about transplanting a brain from one body to another, and about clairvoyant knowledge of another ' s life. 27 This sounds like hippie-era occultism, but the papers in question stretch from 1956 to 1971: which reinforces my point that the newer philosophical mood nevertheless builds upon element s that were already present earlier. Lewis and Kripke's "possible worlds," despite their spacy-sounding metaphysical implications, nevertheless derive from earlier technical efforts to build a modal logic, in answer to criti- cisms of traditional logic. Modal realism can be seen as a way of trying to formalize, and hence tame, speech-act theory and other challenges to classical logic; the "possible worlds" line of argument is a way of meeting the challenge of non-constative speech acts and bringing them back into the fold as truth-functional statements about some other possible world. Some of the most far-out looking forms of current philosophy thus turn out to be among the most conservative, in their effort to counter the attack on some of the main positivist doctrines.

Styles and social identities

It is tempting to regard stylistic matters as trivial, the merest surface of things and of no intellectual significance. I want to dispute this way of looking at the intellectual world. Style is usually taken for granted within one's own group; it seems transparent; one sees right through it to the apparent substance of what one is dealing with. Not so with out- siders, with rival groups. The most immediate claim that opposing intellectual camps make is that the other is unintelligible. Thus the primary attack of the positivists and the analytical schools on the Conti- nental philosophies was to declare them to be meaningless; even today, one disposes of Parisian philosophy by declaring it to be gobbledy-

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gook. The same from the other side: anti-positivists/anti-analyticals declare their enemies to be wrapped up in meaningless or useless formalisms and trivialities.

But the style of an intellectual group usually has been the object of a rather explicit development. What the opposing side sees as jargon, the home team uses as a compact way of conveying points that have been argued out previously at greater length. Technical terminologies are tokens that crystalize the results of previous discussions, and allow one to pack many hidden arguments into one's own sentences. Such terminology encapsulates the past history of the intellectual group, thereby heightening its role as sacred objects in a Durkheimian sense. The style also is a way, of doing work: The formal tools favored by both the analytical and positivist schools are an attempt to adopt the methods of mathematics, so that pared-down symbols can be manipulated on paper to isolate the structural relations among classes of things (or of operations, meta-operations, etc.). 28 The Hegelian (and to a certain extent, Marxian) tradition takes the opposite stylistic strategy: its long, involved, endlessly reflexive syntax expresses the dialectical interrelat- edness of things that is the core of its philosophical vision. Derrida- esque deconstructionism plays meta-games with the texts that are its object through devices like crossing out words or jumping in argument among pithy and paradoxical turns of phrase39 So too for phenomenologists, existentialists, and others; for every intellectual camp, its "rhetorical" style structures the field on which its particular intellectual game is played.

It is not surprising, then, that terminology and the broader aspects of style mark membership in an intellectual community; insiders recognize each other by familiar use of these devices, and exclude would-be interlopers for their clumsy use of them; rival groups are recognized by their commitment to different stylistic devices; the border skirmishing between alien positions is carried out by mutual deprecation of each other's styles. What is a positive sacred object for the home group is not a neutral, but a negative sacred object for the enemy group.

Reorganization of recent intellectual communities

What then can we say about the way intellectual groups are organized, from the "style wars" that have been going on in philosophy? We know, generally speaking, that styles of expression and of thought differ by

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social class, 3~ ranging from the more concrete and context-dependent talk of the localized working class to the abstract and self-reflective discourse of the upper-middle classes. But all intellectuals, professionally, are in specialized enclaves within the cosmopolitan upper-middle class.

All camps of philosophers deal with high levels of abstraction and self- reflection. The discovery of more and more levels of the self-embed- dedness of language (or mathematics, or any other symbol system) has been the common theme of most of the lineages of twentieth-century philosophy. But they have arrived at this by radically different technical routes, and have taken quite different attitudes toward the discovery. The positivists attempted to reduce everything meaningful to science and mathematics, and that to logic and observation, but then came up against the paradoxes (like those of Russell and G6del) that drove them to make more and more distinctions among levels and kinds of statements. The elaboration of technical formalisms has been driven at least in part by the effort to express all these levels in a calculus. The ordinary language wing of the analytical school similarly has pushed out- wards into various kinds of speech acts and modalities. The dialectical, phenomenological, and other Continental movements have expressed an analogous boxes-within-boxes quality of reality but through very different rhetorical devices, and have loaded their discoveries with quite explicit emotional and sometimes political attitudes that hax~e been very alien to the Anglophone style. The difference among twentieth-century philosophical camps has not been in their degree of sophistication or reflexiveness, but lies on the level of what kinds of intellectual manuevers they make with this material. This is what I have suggested stylistic differences are indicators of.

The subject merits full-scale treatment, but let me float a sociological suggestion here. The 1960s upheavals, and the philosophical shifts that seem to be associated with it, can be seen as a crossing of boundaries. But the relevant boundary was not that between professional philosophy (professional academics generally) and the outside world of lay people (whatever that could mean, in class terms -- even though Counterculture ideology vaguely implied a merging with an idealized, pre-reflective working class). The anti-intellectualism of the Counter- culture was only superficially anti-intellectual; in fact it drew upon a long-standing intellectual tradition, that of the literary world. The French '68 student movement adopted a Dadaesque style of "guerilla theatre," which continued the style of anti-bourgeois avant-garde artis- tic expression that had been dominant in France since the turn of the

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century. The main innovation was to extend this style from the literary elite into a mass political movement, based upon students from the expanding university system.

In the United States the cultural side of the student movement was the hippie movement. But though this welled up into a massive phenome- non of wandering dropouts mobilized by networks of psychedelic drug dealers and touring rock musicians, the initial impetus of the movement came from intellectuals in the San Fransisco area. The novelist Ken Keasy and his "Merry Pranksters" popularized the first phase of the hippie style. The same area (including the Big Sur coast) had previously been the center for the "Beat Generation" of the 1950s, and there was some direct continuity in personnel and in lifestyle (marijuana, mesca- line and LSD, living in rural communes, etc.) between the two movements. The major difference was that the "Beatniks" were explicitly intellectuals, led by poets and writers like Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and Kerouac: an elitist movement pessimistically defending high culture against modem society, whereas the 1960s "Counterculture" expanded into a mass movement, full of aggressive optimism about being able to transform the world. The themes of the Counterculture were essentially those of the alienated literary intellectuals, but stripped of the literature itself.

The cultural side of the 1960s political movements, then, was exalting the culture of literary intellectuals over those of specialized academics. In the long run, of course, the academic intellectuals were bound to survive because of their superior resource base, while movements based on emotionalized mass mobilization would turn out to be ephemeral. Nevertheless, it appears that the period of massive mobilization and upheaval brought the literary culture into a stronger position, and gave it some footholds within academic disciplines. The new line-up of intellectual prestige across disciplines seems to have shifted. Where once physics and mathematics were the disciplines toward which others academics looked, now literature and semiotics have achieved a kind of ascendency -- if not domination, nevertheless as vehement contenders for the throne. The theme is widespread in many of the social sciences, in history, and especially in literary scholarship. 31 "Discourse" and "paradigm" have become as much the clichrs of today as "empirically testable" and "operational definition" were thirty years ago.

In this light we can understand the relationship between Continental,

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especially French, philosophy and the Anglophone academic world. In France, above all in Paris, the borders between intellectual communities have been relatively permeable. Philosophy, literature, politics, perhaps science -- all these are activities that the same French intellectuals might perform successfully, and to public acclaim, during their careers. The Anglo, and especially the American, intellectual world, on the contrary, has been based on a sharp organizational separation between different kinds of intellectual activities. For that reason, there has tradi- tionally been a strong difference in the "professional ideologies" of American (and to some extent British) academics vis-/~-vis the Conti- nentals. The French existentialists, for example, combined different intellectual spheres: Sartre, Camus, Merleau-Ponty, and de Beauvoir were equally philosophers, novelists, playwrights, political journalists, and activists. Anglophone philosophers, looking for instance at Sartre's technical philosophy, condemned it for its crossing of boundaries, for the intrusion of engag6 elements, including the alienated themes of the avant-garde literati, into what they were used to treating as an academi- cally insulated technical pursuit.

Perhaps because the intellectual-academic pursuits in France are so closely linked to the political, its intellectual movements tend to be rather short-lived. The existentialists lasted only a brief decade or two (centering on the time of the anti-Nazi resistance movement), before coming apart over political splits (the 1950s issue of French policy towards Communism). Structuralists, deconstructionists, postmod- ernists, and other intellectual movements seem to rise and fall in France as their external political alliances change. But the basic organizational structure of the French intellectual world remains constant: one becomes a leading intellectual by parlaying an academic base into philosophical, literary, and political implications. 32 Only in France could an academic specialist in the history of mental illness expand the implications of his specialty in the way that Foucault did, to become the star of a movement with implications all over the intellectual map.

The upheaval of the 1960s thus was more consequential for intellectual life in the United States than it was in the Continental world. There, the relatively undifferentiated structure of the intellectual world remained intact, and the basic style of doing philosophy (or any other subject) continued more or less the same, although there have been changes in factional dominance. In American universities, though, the 1960s were a strong, if passing, challenge to the prevailing mode of self-contained academic specializations, each pursuing its own technicalities. Prior to

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the sixties the ideal to emulate was that of physics or mathematics, because these were fields that had pushed their own technical self-suffi- ciency the furthest. After the sixties, something like the French model has become the challenging ideal. It is not dominant, of course; given American structural conditions, I would hardly expect that it could become institutionalized. But the legitimacy of the old math/physics image of the intellectual specialist has been seriously weakened; whether fatally or not is hard to say.

The breakup of the analytical/positivist coalition

Perhaps we can now see why it is appropriate to speak of the whole mid-century era in the Anglophone world as "positivist," and hence of the subsequent generation -- our own -- as "post-positivist." Not necessarily in a narrow sense; the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle never achieved a wide hegemony, and themselves split into warring factions almost from the beginning. But for all the differences between this kind of narrow positivism and analytical philosophy more generally (especially its ordinary language branch), all these approaches were modelled on the technical specialization characteristic of mathematics and the most mathematicized physical sciences. The social meaning of this can be understood only by its opposite: it was explicitly antagonistic to the fusion of intellectual spheres characteristic of the Continental intellectual world.

The reasons for this antagonism were rooted in our history. The Anglo- American philosophical Establishment at mid-century had inherited its intellectual identity from a rebellious movement at the turn of the century, which eventually grew into near-absolute power. But this constituted a "school" mainly by reference to its enemies: the Idealists (and by extension, metaphysicians generally), romanticists, the political Right, and eventually all political "extremism." The original intellectual stance came from the battle against Idealism; subsequent opponents came to the fore as Idealism itself faded away. The rallying points for the Anglophone Establishment were the opposites of religion and irrationality: common sense, the ordinary world, ordinary language, science, and mathematics. The 1960s upheavals changed the lineup of external enemies; at that point, the analytical/positivist camp began to dissolve.

To be sure, there were always internal instabilities within its philosophi-

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cal position. But this in itself was not fatal. Quite the contrary: intellectuals live by having problems, topics to write about, puzzles to solve. Kuhn is wrong in believing that a "normal science" is necessarily gov- erned by a paradigm that promises routine solutions to problems; even quite deep and even intractable problems can be useful, provided a group can stake them out as their turf and maintain consensus on a given technique for dealing with them. Instabilities within the analytical/positivist camps were their life-blood, giving them materials to work on. It is the opposite situation that would have been fatal: if indeed it had proved easy to dissolve all philosophical problems by a clear understanding of language, or by using the formalisms of mathematical logic, then philosophy would have been completed, and dead, by 1940, leaving nothing further for philosophers to do.

The saving dynamics of the positivist/analytical coalition came from the fact that all its parts did not all go in the same direction. Common sense and ordinary language came into conflict with mathematics and formal logic; hence the search for new combinations (modal, deontic, and other deviant logics) that would broaden formal logic to encom- pass the other dimensions of speech. But this move itself was not a stable one; on the one hand, it leads into the neo-positivism of "possible worlds" while on the other it has led many practitioners of formal logic to declare explicitly logic's own limits, and the need for multiple forms of discourse for different purposes. 33

Within the mathematical and logical wing itself, there has been a deep instability: the foundational issue in mathematics, raised by Cantor in 19th century mathematics in the treatment of infinities, and program- matically pushed by Frege's set theory, by Hilbert's and Russell's formalisms, and that provoked the counterattack of Brouwer and the mathematical intuitionists. This concern for mathematical foundations has had many ramifications. Some of these are now famous, although until recently considered narrowly technical, such as G6del's proof of the incompleteness of any metasystem of logic. 34 The branch of current philosophy specializing in mathematics has had to deal with just this unresolved issue; thus it is not surprising that a philosopher of mathematics like Dummett should be part of the post-positivist wave to the extent of considering himself an "anti-realist," and titling his main col- lection of papers Truth and Other Enigmas. 35

There were other instabilities in the analytical/positivist coalition. Mili- tants like Carnap hoped to build their fortress on a combination of

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physical observations and mathematical logic, while writing off ordinary language as meaningless (a move that created bad blood with the wing specializing in the meanings of just that ordinary language). Then the observational/instrumentalist side of science started coming apart from the physicalist/materialist side. The historicism of Kuhn's Struc- ture of Scientific Revolutions emphasized the activity of doing science as an ongoing historical project, calling into question the notion of a material world "out there" to be operationalized. 36 Carnap's position even got it from the other side, as the logician Quine became uneasy with the rather mechanical logic that was to be applied to observational sentences; the result was Quine's famous "Two Dogmas of Empiri- cism ''37 in which he denied there is such a thing as "analytical" truths at all -- i.e. truths by definition, which Carnap, as well as Russell and others, had taken as the core of the logical side in their dualistic model (logic and physical observations).

Some of these internal battles within the positivist/analytical camp have become raised retrospectively to new glory. Militant post-positivists like Rorty 38 have taken Quine as one of their heroes; not only for undermining the logical solidity of "analytical" truths, but also for arguing that scientific theories are always underdetermined by the f ac t s . 39 Oddly, in his time Quine seemed just the opposite of an anti- positivist hero. He followed up his attack on "analytical" logic by adopting Skinnerian behaviorism as a basis for a philosophy of meaning and language and hence for statements of reference. Quine, in other words, was attacking the non-empirical side of positivism, in order to move to an even more rigidly positivist position; like Ayer and others half a generation earlier, Quine was ready to drive out the vestiges of philosophy in order to make his discipline identical with physical science. But this landed him entirely on the pragmatist/instrumentalist/behaviorist side, which has its own instability: the recognition that science as the behavior of scientists is inherently shifting and historical; though it may appear solid, the idea side of science -- scientific theories -- is never tightly linked to its observations. Quine is willing to live with this, making philosophy an adjuct to whatever scientists discover. It is only the post-positivist generation that takes Quine's arguments as warrant for subjectivist conclusions.

The positivist/analytical camp, like any other intellectual movement, has fed off its internal problems. These produce transformations, but not a breakdown of the basic mode of doing philosophy. If the generation of the late twentieth century seems to be wavering in a more funda-

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mental sense, stretched between opposing ways of doing philosophy, it is because there have been pressures for a change in the whole underlying structure of the intellectual world. This pressures were most acute during the political upheavals in the universities of the 1960s and early 1970s; but because it takes time for generations of academics to dis- place one another, it seems that this structural force has come to bear fully within philosophy itself only recently. The structural transformation was only partial; the 1960s saw a "university revolt" but not a "university revolution" In ways that we do not yet fully understand, the intellectual infrastructure was shifted part way only, leaving us sus- pended between different forms of the organization of intellectual life.

The foregoing is only a sketch of the social conditions involved in philosophy during the twentieth century. Perhaps it can serve to introduce a few general points about the patterns underlying intellectual activity. Philosophy, like any other discipline, is organized internally into communities. Major innovations within these communities are like social movements, spreading out from intensely organized groups that may exist for only a brief period, like the Cambridge/Bloomsbury group at the beginning of the century, the Vienna Circle, and the Paris existentialists, no These groups go through stages of structuring and dissolution like those proposed in Mullins's theory, 41 both on the level of social networks and of intellectual outputs. One can understand these groups as engaging in the competitive appropriation and creation of cultural capital in relation to previous generations, and to contemporary opponents; a crucial dynamic comes from the rivalries between contemporary opponents -- such as that between the Anglophone and Continental camps -- who shape their identities in contrast to one another. And finally, these groups are anchored in external structures of the society, including above all their positions in educational, political, or other institutions. These institutions give them material support but also generate ideological and motivational forces that rearrange the conditions for internal struggle within the intellectual field, especially in times of institutional upheaval.

Philosophy incorporates the social

Just as sociology has built up its resources for dealing with philosophical issues, current philosophy has come up to borders of sociology. What has motivated philosophy's turn toward the social? In epistemology, this has been done for a limited purpose, to underscore rela-

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tivism via the allegedly shifting and contextual nature of belief. Phi- losophers usually play the sociological trump card, not as an opening for further development, but as the closure of debate, the nail in the positivist coffin. Another approach to the social has been through the analytic wing. Wittgensteinians, Austinian speech-act theorists, and ordinary language philosophers have for a long time been oriented to see at least some philosophical topics as composed of social activities. But this sociological turn has not gone very far, as if it comes up against a barrier to inquiring very deeply into what kind of social processes these actually are.

One source of resistance is philosophers' commitment to discovering non-contingent, enduring conditions of judgment, meaning, logic, or morality that hold for all thought and all knowledge; by their very nature, such eternal verities cannot be affected by merely empirical particulars, which presumably make up the content of sociology. How can this objection be answered? Some portion of the philosophical world - - especially the most militant of the post-positivist (and postmod- ernist) generation, does evoke the social precisely because it rejects the ideal of philosophy as detached and grounded on eternal verities, and instead sees everything as historically contingent. Without necessarily going that far, we can recognize that whatever fundamental, eternal, or transcedent verities there may be, we approach them only via the tem- poral -- and social -- world in which we exist. The nature of logic, truth, and other objects of traditional philosophy, however objective they might turn out to be, cannot be discovered without confronting the social dimension in which they are grounded and -- many of us would argue -- through which they are constituted.

Some philosophers seem prepared to admit this. The problem is that they begin on this path, but fail to go very far down it. An example is Alasdair Maclntyre, who writes that ' ~ moral philosophy.., presup- poses a sociology, ''42 but then goes on to flay misleadingly simplistic versions of Weber and of Goffman, as if they saw modem society as completely Machiavellian and lacking in ethics. The irony is that Weber and Goffman, together with Durkheim (whom Maclntyre does not cite), provide just the understanding of the historical transformation in ideals of virtue that Maclntyre was trying to explain. The Durkheim/ Goffrnan insights provide a better answer than Maclntyre can provide as to why Enlightenment rationalism could not ground a modem secular morality. But the sociologists avoid Maclntyre's romanticist fallacy of harkening back to an allegedly harmonious and integrated society of

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the past, in contrast to which today's society is degenerate. It is better sociology to recognize that all forms of social interaction produce their particular kinds of moral standards and embody them in symbolic "sacred objects," even in the context of modern everyday life. In effect, Maclntyre is reaching toward a historical Durkheimian sociology, without knowing it, and hence getting only halfway there. And this is emblematic of the current situation of philosophy.

Sociology's resources for doing philosophy

How, then, can we expect sociology to be substantively relevant to philosophy? I suggest that sociology has much to say on a number of issues, such as the mind/body relation, and on the ontological questions of realism and anti-realism, materialism and idealism. Having been invoked at first in epistemology, sociology now seems to point even deeper into philosophy's core, into metaphysics.

Erving Goffman's later work is a sophisticated entrre into these issues, but it must be read with a theoretical eye. Readers who view Goffman merely as the purveyer of the exotic backstage side of life tend to miss the analytical use that Goffman is making of his material. He was pursuing a Durkheimian strategy of showing what constitutes socially normal reality by contrasting it with the occasions on which normalcy breaks down. Although Goffman never wrote systematically (and in fact tended to hide his deeper implications in a trendy cuteness of exposition), his Frame Analysis and Forms of Talk contain pointed cri- tiques of rival stances in micro-sociology, linguistics, and neighbouring philosophical schools such as phenomenology and ordinary language analysis. 43 These are veins that deserve to be mined in depth.

Goffman conceived of "frames" as the socially accepted reality of each moment, the answer to the question: "What is going on here?" These social realities are reflexive and emergent, but nevertheless orderly. Goffman is not simply making the fashionable point that realities are constructed and shift with the context; he is stressing that frames are built up by transformations from adjacent frames, and hence are chain- linked together. Further, there are primary frames from which the rest are built. The most basic is the physical world itself, and the human bodies who are in each other's presence upon it. The world depicted by idealism and reflexive philosophies certainly exists, and Goffman shows us how this is possible. But it is built upon a great deal of solid

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social activity, building up Jacob's ladder to heaven by sensuous human activity in time and space. Goffman's model thus casts a new and interesting light on ontological issues, transcending the alternatives of materialism and idealism, while remaining firmly grounded in real-life. Although Goffman does not put it explicitly, one can say that the presentation of self of his early works, the front-staging done by human bodies with material props, is a material construction of ideal realities. I would say that the subtlety of human realities on all levels has never been set forth better than in Goffman's total corpus.

In Forms of Talk, Goffman applies his framing/self-presentation model to give the element of a general theory of language. This might well be called the social ecology of language, as Goffman shows that language is meaningful only because it is embedded within an ongoing chain of social situations; ground zero is always the physical co-presence of people, of human animals, who are "tracking one another and acting so as to make themselves trackable" (103). Conundrums of implicit, contextual meanings in language can only be resolved by seeing this chain of groundings (i.e. of reframings, if seen from the other direction). Goffman shows this, among other methods, by focussing on a typically "Goffmanian" topic of "self-talk" -- cries, mutterings, and so forth that people utter in the presence of others but without being in conversation with them. Goffman manages to extract a powerfully Durkheimian -- and Wittgensteinian -- point out of this; for these blurted sounds are generally not sheer a-social expressions, but arise following some action that others will notice; they constitute a rectifying "invitation into our interiors," not "a flooding of emotion outward, but a flooding of relevance in" (121). Like Wittgenstein, Goffman denies the intrinsi- cally private nature of experience; 44 this is consistent with the rest of his frame analysis, which implies a radically social basis, even for the most subtle and multi-levelled characteristics of the human mind.

There are some ironic consequences of Goffman's analysis vis-h-vis philosophy. At the height of the logical positivist generation, Ayer and Carnap dismissed most of philosophy by an analysis that equated all statements that could not be verified empirically to the status of meaningless utterances like "ouch!" Now Goffman has rescued "ouch!" for the province of meaning, and with it provided a model for the nested grounding of emergent levels of reality.

A Goffmanian sociology is especially useful now because it can medi- ate between the extreme positions in the post-positivist world, between

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the older science-oriented reductionism and the newer tendency toward radical subjectivism and relativism. Charles Taylor, for example, wishes to hoist the flag of human agency and self-definition and strike that of mechanism and objectivism. Hence Taylor as points to emotions and to conversation as realities that his camp alone can properly recognize. Taylor is right that the older, positivist programs are a failure on the topic of language and emotion. But these are not simply areas of free-floating indeterminism. Goffxnan shows a path towards systematic explanation of such topics, albeit in complex and multi-levelled ways, which explicitly account for the emergent and reflexive quality of these core human activities.

Sociology has further resources on the philosophy front. George Herbert Mead is an obvious one, Garfinkel and ethnomethodology another. As is apparent from the foregoing, I would prefer to see these sociologies made use of in the context of a Durkheim/Goffinan understanding of social interaction and cognition. 46 But that can hardly be decreed, and they are full of philosophical interest even in their barest essentials. Ironically, Mead was himself a philosopher far more than a sociologist, although sociologists prefer to read his works selectively, concentrating on the lectures on self and society. A look at his full corpus shows that he was essentially concerned to handle traditional epistemological and ontological problems. His social theory of mind, and especially the device of the Generalized Other, was designed to cir- cumvent the idealism/realism debates of American philosophy in his time. Mead was far more interested in the epistemological construction of the physical world, than in understanding the macro structures of society (upon which he touched rather glibly). 47 One of the merits of Hans Joas's 48 new treatment of Mead is to point up how powerful Mead can be, not just in sociology but in dealing with core topics of philosophy.

In a sense, using Mead in epistemology and ontology is a bit like cheating; he didn't set out to be sociologist, it is only that he was ig- nored by his fellow philosophers. For American philosophy was dominated in Mead's day by idealists who dismissed pragmatism as episte- mologically vulgar, while the Young Turks who took power about the time of Mead's death were the positivist/analytical crowd, riding a wave across the Atlantic and upstaging all else by their radicalism. Mead's philosophy has lived in exile in sociology, and only now, after the positivist tide has ebbed, does it have the chance to return to its native land.

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There is a rough parallel in the case of ethnomethodology. 49 As is well known, ethnomethodology is a development of Schutz's social phenomenology, which itself was an explicit application of Husserlian methods to the Weberian sociology of action. 5~ Garfinkel is carrying out Husserrs program, and in that sense might be regarded as a philosopher working within sociology, more than a sociologist in any traditional sense. That would fit the self-definition of the ethnomethodo- logical movement, which at one time used to stress that it was not doing sociology, but merely used sociology as a topic and a resource for ethnomethodology. This is the kind of statement that tended to infuri- ate main-line sociologists; but it is more palatable if we see that Garfinkel and his more orthodox followers are doing a Husserlian bracketing of the contents of sociology, in order to pick out the necessary forms of social understanding. Where Garfinkel does draw on sociological resources, thereby moving beyond Husserl, Schutz, and the entire philosophical tradition, is by eschewing "arm-chair" methods in favor of actual "experiments" field observations, and other empirical analyses of everyday life -- a mixture of sociological research with an existentialist-like mood of detached intervention that is a genuine innovation in the history of both disciplines, philosophy and sociology alike.

Like Mead, then, Garfinkel's etlmomethodology might well return home from exile into philosophy; it would merely have to be invoked as a continuation, radical in some respects, of the epistemological project that Husserl began and never successfully brought to a conclusion. Per- sonally, I think that it would be best if this sojourn of phenomenology in sociology were allowed to soak up some other elements of the sociological traditions. Garfinkelian indexicality and reflexivity, for example, can be understood in less paradoxical ways in the light of Goffmanian frame analysis; and the outrage with which Garfinkel's subjects reacted to the breaching experiments should be assimilated to the Durk- heirnian perspective that predicts just such a moral/emotional response to the violation of collective symbols. In short, I think that the heritage of ethnomethodology is even more interesting when treated as another ingredient for a more complex vision of sociological/philosophical issues.

Conclusion

Sociology, then, should prove to be relevant to a host of issues within

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the traditional purview of philosophy: Epistemology and philosophy of science, of course; the issue of solipsism and other minds (as Habermas has already seen, invoking Mead); ontological issues of the mind/body relation, of person/self/identity (on which there is a wealth of untapped materials, from Goffinan, Mead, and in the lineage of Durkheim and Mauss now being rediscovered); 51 and more deeply the questions of materialism/idealism, realism and anti-realism. All questions in the philosophy of ethics, ranging from conceptual analysis to critical and constructive ethics, make sense realistically only if handled with a sociological understanding of where moral ideals and feelings emerge from. The extent of possible success of sociological explanations is a crucial point for any discussion of determinism and indeterminism, and relatedly for the notion of will, free or otherwise. (Obviously the sociology of the self is implicated in the free-will issue as well.) The micro/ macro issue is a wonderful ground on which to consider questions of universals and particulars, of the different orders of causality, of reifica- tion and reductionism.

Though it may seem presumptious to say so, sociology has implications fight across the board in philosophy, even in its stronghold of metaphysics: space and time, existence and non-existence, the Ideal and the immediacy of lived experience are all parts of our current sociological controversies. As yet we have not been very bold in bringing such implications of sociology to attention. But there is recent work such as that of Preston 52 on the sociology of Zen practice, which is relevant to a philosophy of ontology at its deepest levels. Furthermore, I feel opti- mistic about sociology's capacity to contribute to these issues philo- sophically, that is to say within the problem-space of philosophy itself. Tools like Goffmanian frame analysis, with a nested and grounded relation among levels, should cast light even on tricky issues such as infinities and logical indeterminacies, ontological foundations and un- foundedness. After all, if reality is socially constructed, why shouldn't our professional understanding of society reveal something central about the universe? 53

As of now, these implications remain only potential. But to buttress my claim for the relevance of sociology in just one area, epistemology and the reflexive issues that arise within it, let me close with a brief reflection on what the sociology of science implies about the nature of philosophy itself. We can hardly expect that sociology will give a final and definitive answer to philosophy's problems. I say that, not because of any pessimism about our intellectual tools, but because of the very

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nature of intellectual communities. Intellectuals make careers by gaining fame for their original contributions; there must be problems to solve if there is to be something to contribute. This of course is true of all areas of science and scholarship. But whereas the empirical disciplines can go on to create new specialties and research areas, philosophers do not have the same way out of the professional problem posed by a field's own past success.

Philosophy has handled this problem in a deeper way. For philosophers have taken as their turf precisely those problems that are themselves inherently deep and, in some sense, intractable. Philosophers have tra- ditionally been concerned with the understanding of knowledge itself, with the most fundamental categories of existence and experience, with the bases .of value. These are the boundary problems of all the other fields of intellectual inquiry, and of human ,life itself. They are intractable, not because significant things cannot be said about them, but because they are located at the open edges of everything; they reveal themselves full of reflexivities, which constantly reemerge at a new level whenever a conceptual solution is proposed, much as in G6del's incompleteness theorem - and in the most highly transformed level of Goffananian frames.

It is for this reason that the history of philosophy is full of complaints that previous philosophers have come to no agreement, along with new beginnings that attempt to finish its business at last. There is a striking repetitiveness to these claims: we hear them from Descartes, and again from Kant, from the Logical Positivists, from Wittgenstein, in their different ways; there is more than an echo of this intellectual strategy in today's extremists, such as Rorty and Derrida, who again are abolishing philosophy. But philosophy has not been abolished; each previous claim to bring the uselessly warring sects of the past into a final resolu- tion has failed to stifle philosophy's perennial inquiries. Just as strikingly, each such effort at ending philosophy has given rise to a period of renewed philosophical creativity.

I think this is not an accident. It is because the structure of the intellectual field in general (across the disciplines, not only philosophy) is being restructured at a particular historical time that figures like Descartes, Kant, and others appear; the crisis of intellectual restruc- turing is what gives them the intellectual capital (and the creative ener- gy) to reconceptualize the fundamental boundary problems in a new way. In this sense, philosophy is indeed "foundational"; it concerns

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itself with the ultimate questions, the borderlines of all inquiry and all of life. But there is another sense of '~foundational," the claim that philosophy is the discipline necessary for putting all other knowledge upon a secure foundation. This is certainly not true in a practical and historical sense; the other disciplines have gone ahead quite well without guidance from philosophy. Kant's claim to provide a secure foundation for the physical sciences against Hume's scepticism was really a rhetorical ploy, a way of building up the importance of what philosophy is doing; it really made no difference to the growth of science in Hume's day, or in Kant's, just what the philosophers said about the foundations of their knowledge. The same is true for all such claims about the significance of foundational issues.

But this is not to dismiss the importance of what philosophers are doing. Theirs is the great intellectual adventure into the edges of things. The rest of the disciplines, the rest of what we consider to be knowledge, nestled in a pragmatic acceptance of whatever seems to work for us as intellectual practitioners, do not rest upon philosophy. The structural relation among intellectual fields is more the other way around, as far as the dynamics of intellectual change are concerned. But philosophy has nevertheless positioned itself in the intellectual ,pace where the deepest explorations are launched. This will continue to be so, even as sociology adds its own impetus to the philosophical project.

Acknowledgments

For comments and advice on previous drafts I am indebted to Ann Rawls, Michele Lamont, Sal Restivo, Norbert Wiley, Manfred Stanley, and David Swartz.

Notes

1. Richard Whitley, The Intellectual and Social Organization of the Sciences (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).

2. But see C. Wright Mills, Sociology and Pragmatism: The Higher Learning in Ameri- ca (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942/1969); Michele Lamont, "How to Become a Dominant French Philosopher: the Case of Jacques Derrida," American Journal of Sociology 93: (1987) 584--622; Randall Collins, "A Micro-Macro Theory of Creativity in Intellectual Careers: the Case of German Idealist Philoso- phy," Sociological Theory 5 (1987): 47--69.

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3. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton Univer- sity Press, 1979).

4. Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).

5. Charles Taylor, Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

6. Melvin Richter, The Politics of Conscience: T. H. Green and His Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964).

7. In the United States the pragmatists and the New Realists played a role in breaking away from Idealism somewhat analogous to that of Russell and Moore in Britain, although the early pragmatists also incorporated some elements of idealism. This was particularly so at Harvard, where Peirce, James, Royce (and in his student days, Mead) developed their philosophies both from and in opposition to each other. See Herbert W. Schneider, A History of American Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963); Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philoso- phy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860--1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Randall Collins, "Toward a Neo-Median Sociology of Mind" Symbolic Interaction ( 1989, forthcoming).

8. Wittgenstein's stance also included a place for quasi-religious issues such as ethical commitments and the meaning of life. But his Tractatus (1921) placed these beyond the bounds of what could meaningfully be said, thereby leaving the intellectual terrain to strictly construed logical/scientific statements. See Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein's Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973). For all his sympathies with an activist mysticism like that of Tolstoi and Tagore, Wittgenstein was just as antagonistic as Russell and Moore were to Idealist constructions within philosophy, because these attempted to speak rationally about that regarding which one must remain silent.

9. See Joseph Ben-David, The Scientist's Role in Society (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Pren- rice-Hall, 1971), 108--125; Collins, "A Micro-Macro Theory of Creativity in Intel- lectual Careers."

10. A vivid depiction of this intellectual mood in Vienna, which already predated World War I, is in Robert Musirs novel, The Man Without Qualities, published 1930--32. See also William M. Johnston, The Austrian Mind. An Intellectual and Social History, 1848--1938 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); and Janik and Toulmin, Wittgenstein's Vienna.

11. Randall Collins and Sal Resfivo, "Robber-barons and Politicians in Mathematics: A Conflict Model of Science," Canadian Journal of Sociology 8:(1983) 199--227.

12. John Passmore, One Hundred Years of Philosophy (Baltimore: Penguin, 1968), 367--423; A. J. Ayer, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (New York: Random House, 1982), 121--141; Johnston, The Austrian Mind, 181--195.

13. The development of the Vienna Circle appears to fit the general model of intellectual "theory groups" formulated by Belver C. Griffith and Nicholas C. Mullins, "Coherent Groups in Scientific Change," Science 177 (1972): 959--964, and Mul- fins, Theories and Theory Groups in Contemporary American Sociology (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). The early statements, before 1924, that were to became the intellectual ingredients of the Circle, fit in Mullins's preliminary stage of developments within the "normal science" of some previous intellectual context. The period 1924--1928 is Mullins's network stage, in which an informal group begins to crystallize around the original intellectual leader (Schlick); there also appears a organizational leader (Neurath); institutional bases are captured to support group

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members (at the University of Vienna and a Neurath's Social and Economic Museum). These activities attract new collaborators and students; relations are es- tablished with friendly groups (in Berlin, Warsaw), and attacks arc issued on rival positions. During 1928 to about 1933 is Mullins's clgsterstage: the group becomes formally organized (1928), there is the appearance of a manifesto (1929), the founding of a journal (1930), and a series of international congresses (1929-- 1938) to propagate their viewpoint. As frequently happens, toward the end of this period the group begins to split (with the migration of Carnap and others to a secondary center at Prague). Internal intellectual divisions now become hardened, as the wings of the school (the Neurath/Carnap physicalist wing vs. the Schlick sen- sationalist wing) acquire their own public identities. The success of the Circle in attracting intellectual attention brought foreign visitors, such as Ayer and Quine, who began to carry its methods and messages abroad and to combine them with other positions. Thus even the impetus to dissolution of the original Circle given by the ascendancy of right-wing politics in Austria after 1934 appears only to have coincided with the pattern than Mullins finds in the life-history of intellectual groups more generally: the breaking up of the original group (which Mullins calls the "specialty stage') just as its message was becoming widely propagated and attracting adherents in the larger intellectual community. A similar structural pattern seems to appear in the case of the Paris existentialists.

14. For detailed evidence, see Randall Collins, The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification (New York: Academic Press, 1979).

15. In the early 1960s, approximately 40% of the appropriate age group in the United States was attending university-level institutions, and 18% were receiving college degrees; in France university attendance was about 11%, in England and Germany 6% (with most of these attaining degrees, however: the difference between the "contest mobility" structure of the United States and the "sponsored mobility" structures of Europe; data from Collins, The Credential Society, 1979: 92). By the 1970s, U.S. attendance figures peaked out at about 50%, whereas most European systems doubled or tripled their attendance levels. The expansion of the European universities was thus many decades behind that of the United States. Perhaps it is for this reason that Europe in the 1980s retains some features similar to the United States 15 years earlier, such as the Greens movement and the vogue of Countercul- ture practices such as psychotherapy groups.

16. John Pawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971). 17. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974). 18. Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981). 19. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (London: New Left Books, 1975). 20. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton Univer-

sity Press, 1979). 21. David Pears, Wittgenstein (London: Collins, 1971), 184. 22. Nozick, Philosophical Explanations, 1. 23. Ibid., 123. 24. David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Basil BlackweU, 1986), 1. 25. Respectively by David Kaplan, Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975): 716--729, and

Susan Haack, Review of Metaphysics 33 (1977): 415--29. 26. Bernard Williams, "Personal Identity and Individuation," Proceedings of the Aris-

totelian Society 57 (1956--7): 229--252. 27. Later taken up by Derek Parfit, "Personal Identity," Philosophical Review 80

(1971): 3--37.

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28. William Kneale and Martha Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).

29. For example the chapters headings of John Sallis's Spacings -- of Reason and Imag- ination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987): "Turmelings--"; "Hover- hags --"; "Enroutings --"; "Tremorings --"; "Ending(s) --." Instead of the conven- tional "Preface" he has an "Occlusion," which begins: "Spacing -- reiterated lapse, almost without limit; slippage into the open, spreading truth even into untruth, separating it from itself in a way that would once have been called separation as such, the advent of crisis, a crisis of truth, of reason. It is also the condition for a preface, the lodging of the preface," (page ix).

30. Basil Bernstein, Class, Codes, and Control (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971--5); Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979/1984); Randall Collins, Theoretical Sociology, (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1988), 208--225.

31. This has involved an upheaval in academic literature departments themselves. At mid-century, American (and British) literature departments were dominated by New Criticism and similar technical approaches that divorced the study of literature rather sharply from its content (cf. Gerald Graft, Professing Literature: An Institutional History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). This was an inwardly looking professionalism, that divided academics from the social attitudes of practicing writers themselves (and which apparently drove former literature students like Kerouac, Ginsberg, and others -- all from Columbia -- into dropping out as "the Beat generation"). New Criticism was something like the professional equivalent of analytic philosophy: both made their topics into encapsulated academic specialties, of interest to no one but other academic specialists. The "literary theory" that has swept literature departments since the 1970s, on the contrary, breaks down barriers; it aggressively takes the whole world of "texts" as its subject, and thus spills over into philosophy, anthropology, politics -- wherever it can make inroads.

32. Cf. Lamont, "How to Become a Dominant French Philosopher." 33. For instance, Saul Kripke, a leading practitioner of modal logic, wrote his major

philosophical statement (Naming and Necessity, 1972/1980) ha a deliberately loose and literary style, to underline the point that philosophers "should maintain a proper scepticism of attempts easily to settle linguistic or other empirical questions by quick a priori formal considerations" (quoted in John Passmore, Recent Philosophers, 1985, 58). I think the very fact that the formal side of analytic/positivism has had to wrestle with these conundrums has been part of the internal forces moving toward the stylistic "freakiness" discussed above in relation to externally driven changes in the structure of intellectual fields.

34. Some of the ramifications of this have been also shaped the Continental camps. For instance, it is this foundational crisis in mathematics that set off Husserl -- initially a mathematician -- on his search for the phenomenological method to overcome the "crisis of European man." See Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy (New York: Harper, 1911--1936/1965); The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, (posthumous) (Evanston, I11.: North- western University Press, 1954/1970).

35. Michael Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978).

36. Kuhn's famous book was written at the solicitation of Charles Morris, the Chicago pragmatist and discipline of George Herbert Mead, for the Encyclopedia of Unified

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Science (see Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962: x; also Eugene Rochberg-Halton, Meaning and Modernity: Social Theory in the Pragmatic Attitude, 1986 71--94). But this was the project of Neurath and Carnap, the most militant wing of the Vienna Circle; Kuhn's was one of the few pieces of the Ency- clopedia ever published. Its main success was thus to seal the final undermining of the original logical positivist program.

37. Willard V. Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," Philosophical Review 60:(1951) 20--43.

38. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature; see also, within sociology, Stephan Fuchs, "The Social Organization of Scientific Knowledge," Sociological Theory 4 (1986): 126--142.

39. Willard V. O. Quine, "On the reason for indeterminacy of translation," Journal of Philosophy 67 (1969): 179-83.

40. On the generality of these structures in science, see Derek de Solla Price, Little Science, Big Science, and Beyond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

41. Theories and Theory Groups. 42. Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame

Press, 1984), 23. 43. Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), and Forms

of Talk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981). A work similarly rich in philosophical implications is David Sudnow, Talk's Body. A Meditation between Two Keyboards, (New York: Knopf, 1979). See also Anne Rawls, "Interac- tion as a Resource for Epistemological Critique," Sociological Theory 2 (1984): 222--252, and "The Interaction Order Sui Generis: Goffman's Contribution to Social Theory," Sociological Theory 5 (1987): 136-149, for an explicit use of Goff- man vis-h-vis philosophical arguments.

44. Similarly David Bloor, in his Wittgenstein: A Social Theory of Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983) argues that Wittgenstein's later philosophy is congruent with an essentially Durkheimian, i.e. social, conception of mind. Bloor's interpretation of Wittgenstein has been controversial, because it goes against the grain of the Wittgensteinian school in philosophy; that school prefers to rest with a purely critical Wittgenstein, who disproves any constructive theory of language or human action, and falls back on ordinary life as the logical primitive of any philosophical argument. Yet Durkheimian sociology, applied to everyday life by Goffman, transforms this primitive grounds into a subject for explanation.

45. Human Agency and Language, 189. 46. As I have proposed in "Toward a Neo-Meadian Theory of Mind." 47. See George Herbert Mead, The Philosophy of the Act (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1938), especially 357--442. 48. Hans Joas, G.H. Mead. A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought (Cam-

bridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1985). 49. Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-

Hall, 1967); Harold Garfinkel, Michael Lynch, and Eric Livingston, "The Work of Discovering Science Construed from Materials from the Optically Discovered Pulsar," Philosophy of the Social Sciences 11 (1971): 131--138; Emanuel A. Schegloff, "Between Macro and Micro: Contexts and Other Connections," in Jeffrey C. Alexander, editor, The Micro-Macro Connection (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).

50. See also Christopher Prendergast, "Alfred Schutz and the Austrian school of Economics." American Journal of Sociology 92 (1986): 1--26.

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51. Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes, editors, The Category of the Person (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Norbert Wiley, "The Sacred Self: Durkheim's Anomaly," paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, New York, 1986.

52. David Preston, Constructing Trans-cultural Reality: the Social Organization of Zen Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

53. Sal Restivo (personal communication) suggests that this line of argument can go even farther: "You [Collins] seem to fall into the same sort of trap that people like Rorty fall into. Everything you say spells the end of philosophy, but somehow philosophy gets saved in the end. Once Durkheim enters the picture, what's left of'ultimate questions'? Doesn't the sociology of religion reveal that philosophy's concern with 'ultimate questions' (like religion's) is a strategy and a sham -- and that it is sociology and anthropology ultimately that realistically address 'ultimate questions'? It seems to me that sociologizing philosophy FEARLESSLY destroys philosophy. So in this view sociologizing philosophy can't lead to a 'philosophy' of sociology, but only a sociology of sociology. 'Philosophy without mirrors' (Rorty) is sociology/ anthropology; 'philosophy with a hammer' (Nietzsche) is sociology/ anthropology. In a very real sense, sociologizing philosophy is like trying to sociol- ogize religion -- either sociology has to dilute its explanatory power, or philosophy/religion has to evaporate as an intellectual strategy. The death of philosophy is another step in the Death of God process." For a more extensive argument, see Sal Restivo, "The End of Epistemology," Department of Science and Technology Occasional Papers 1 (1984), Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy N.Y.

for a sociological philosophy

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