Fellow SimSoc members:

The thread between Ross and Alan, reference to Durkheim, has peaked my 
interest.  My response to Alan is an elaboration and a different 
perspective.  I recognize the problems with Durkheim's use of consensus but 
believe that Durkheim retained elements of interaction and autonomy that 
don't have to be construed as strictly top-down, or at least these elements 
offer inroads to where we may ground interactions - at the level of 
autonomy and reasoned judgment, individuals break norms, rules.  Durkheim 
stressed the importance of moral education, thus, the passages I refer to 
are in context of his book, Moral Education:  A Study in the Theory and 
Application of the Sociology of Education.  This is an abbreviated version 
of an unpublished manuscript.

Leslie Henrickson
Social Sciences and Comparative Education
University of California - Los Angeles

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Durkheim's social theory can be characterized as having both collectivist 
and positivist tendencies.   He stressed the importance of the group as the 
origin of the norms and goals of individuals.  He stressed the importance 
of a secular, rationalized moral foundation for a society.  The moral 
foundation for a society was best transmitted through the educational 
system.  He argued that morality had three essential elements:  discipline, 
affinity  for the group and autonomy.  Discipline provided the proper moral 
temperament which prompts persons to act morally.  It provided the limits 
in order to achieve a proper balance between limited energy and multiple 
needs.  The assumption behind discipline was an appeal to a consensus on 
what constitutes morality.   Moreover, he assumed that there are basic 
elements to morality which people in society agreed upon.  The second 
aspect to Durkheim's theory, affinity toward the group, focused on the 
content of moral acts and how they were directed.  He claimed that behavior 
toward personal ends can never have moral value in and of itself.   The 
third element to moral education was autonomy.  Durkheim argued that the 
balance between egoism and total determinism is through rational and 
scientific thought.  Moral laws emerge through historical time and 
prescribe certain behaviors.  Autonomy is the willingness to accept the 
prescribed responsibility under the weight of reasoned judgment.

The relation to traditional science assumptions are as follows.  Both 
Durkheim and traditional science assume normative consensus over the data 
of interest.  Any outliers of the data are considered anomalies and either 
ignored or considered deviant.  For example, Durkheim's consideration of 
anomie, the state of normlessness, is his attempt to understand outliers in 
the face a dominant normative scheme.  Both Durkheim and traditional 
science understand the field of science to provide the source of true 
knowledge.  Hence, Durkheim emphasizes the secular place of schools to 
promote morality, not the church.  He adopts a reductionist attitude toward 
morality by assuming that there are elemental, fundamental aspects to 
morality.  He assumes the norms are constant over long periods of time and 
that there is consensus on these norms.

Furthermore, one can understand his three tiered moral system as presenting 
a scientific approach to making a moral judgement.  Discipline provides the 
constant backdrop over a long period of time of a society's norms.  A group 
represents a local particularity, i.e. family, friends, job, that may have 
particular interpretations of the long-term norms.  For example, the 
discipline norm is "do not lie."  The group norm may be "do not lie to your 
mother or father about big things".  The individual represents the specific 
incident of moral deliberation.  A moral decision is made in context of 
which group one is in and against the backdrop of society norms.  For 
example, I broke my mother's favorite vase.  My inclination is to deny 
this.  My discipline informs me to not lie.  My group affinity informs me 
to be truthful to my mother.  Therefore, my scientific deliberation of 
comparison to a norm or standard is doubled checked against both the larger 
society and the local group.  I rationalise my moral decision and choose to 
be truthful based on these two pieces of evidence or untruthful based on my 
relation to "anomie" and conflicting "reasoned judgements".



At 10/11/00 04:56 PM +0100, you wrote:
>Dear Ross
>
>You wrote:
>
>
> >These emergent individual
> >properties are also "objective", They play a role in agents'
> >achievements, independent of agents' mental states. You may suffer
> >from a bad reputation, or enjoy a good one, without knowing it. This
> >is an example of  effects of social structures that are not reflected
> >into the agents' representations.
> >Properties like reputation are *emergent* top-down effects. This
> >appears to be a paradox, but it is not. Agents derive them (another
> >example is responsibility) from their being involved into a
> >super-individual entity or activity.
>
>This may be the clearest expression of what appears to be a general
>attachment to Durkheimian sociology within very many of the postings. I
>have already noted off-list to two contributors that it is beginning to
>seem that simulation is implicitly being used to pursue what in sociology
>is seen to be Durkheim's agenda as specified in "The Rules of Sociological
>Method". (So as not to be obscure - Durkheim set out to:
>
>1) identify social realities external to the individual
>2) investigate these through the application of scientific methods
>3) develop a science of the social separate from biology and psychology.
>
>To do this he formed ideas about collective representations and social
>facts (things that can be studied independently of the individual - like
>legal rules, traditions and moral positions))
>
>  There are many problems with this attempt to found a sociology that can be
>pursued by scientific methods, not least being the difficulty of measuring
>the effects of or otherwise quantifying  "social facts" - Ross's "emergent
>top-down effects"? (There are also ontological tensions - but we don't need
>to go there again do we :-))
>
> From the postings to date there seems to be a reluctance to model from the
>bottom up entirely, so aspects of social structure that are deemed to be
>independent to some degree of individual acts are included. But how do you
>assess the degree of influence they will have - which is the same as the
>problem affecting Durkheim's work? I know of no way of mapping from
>indivdual agency to collective representations in a quantitative manner.
>So, within a given model, what guides the extent and manner of interactions
>between agents that are social (structure) and agents that have intention?
>Observation? But where is it grounded?
>
>Alan
>
>Please note alternate e-mail address
>
>[log in to unmask]
>
>____________________________________________________________________________
>
>Please copy all e-mail to: [log in to unmask]
>____________________________________________________________________________
>Dr. Alan Dean
>Lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology
>School of Comparative and Applied Social Sciences
>The University of Hull
>Hull
>HU6 7RX
>UK
>
>Phone:  +44 (1482) 465743
>E-mail: [log in to unmask]
>Fax:    +44 (1482) 466306
>____________________________________________________________________________



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