Has anyone looked at sociology from a praxeological perspective? Anyways, here are my thoughts on how the three fundamental sociological perspectives can be deduced based on “humans act”.
Lets start with one
Symbolic Interactionism - “Human beings act toward things on the basis of the meanings they ascribe to those things.” - Lets say that I tried to act towards something opposite to the meaning I ascribed to it. This is self contradictiory, as I am ascribing a meaning, and at the same time trying to contradict it. Therefore, the statement is an axiom.
“The meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with others and the society.” - I don’t know if this is true, or how to go about a proof/disproof. However, would this statement hold in a Robinson Cruesoe society?
“These meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretative process used by the person in dealing with the things he/she encounters.” - If I deny it, that the meaning is unhandled and unmodified, my denial of the idea is handling, and modifying the meaning of this statement. Another axiom.
I don’t know about the second, I don’t know if there is anyway of telling how someone came to value something. I think that is the task of psychology anyway, not sociology. Putting it in terms of a Crusoe society, it makes me wonder how new meanings are ever assigned. If people have to get the meaning of things from others, then individuals would not be able make use of new things. That is absurd. So it isn’t true. I do think that a lot of things meaning does come from others however.
The third needs a lot of clarification. Can you give a more detailed explanation of it? What do you mean by modified?
If you are saying that people receive data, and then attempt to comprehend and manipulate that data, I totally agree. I don’t know how this relates to subjective value though (not [believed to be] objective facts).
Perhaps people try to understand what other people value, give meaning to, and then integrate what that thing means to them in light of their perceived understanding of someone else evaluation of a good.
For instance a man sees a woman looking at a rock that she likes, and when he comes across that same kind of rock later, he may see it as valuable even though he never thought of it as so before. He may notice it as pretty, or he may attempt to give the rock to her as a gift. Still, I don’t know if that is always the case. I can imagine people not being affected at all by others values, there doesn’t seem to be anything outright absurd about that.
I disagree with the remark that Symbolic Interaction says that individuals do ‘create institutions etc voluntarily’ by interaction. The premises of (Blumer’s) SI are about individuals creating meaning for themselves in order to understand (and act) in the (social) world. Meaning is shaped by the thoughts (interpretation) and language (plus symbols).
From the SI perspective this means that we can see Institutions as symbols, language in themselves, which we can interprete in a certain way and to which we do give meaning to them. Just as the different individual people affiliated to a ‘institution’ try to give meaning to their actions by the meaning and interpretation they have of that instititution.
Also when looking to (Goffman’s) Front-stage / Back-stage explanation of social interaction it doesn’t deal with ‘creating institutions’ but with ‘action to give meaning’.
Clearly the SI theories are influenced by the pramaticism philosophy of William James, Charles Peirce and the likes.
I am interested in hearing from other people more on similarities and contradictions in perspective between Praxeology and Symbolic Interactionism