Explaining Behavior 1: What Is "Theory?"
Most sociological theory explains nothing.
Several years ago, the North Central Sociological Association had its annual meeting. As is common for these sociology meetings, it had a theme: “In Defense of Theory.”
If one isn’t familiar with the weird world of sociology, this might seem bizarre. Why on earth does theory need defending?
In a successful science, theory is the core of accumulated knowledge. As biologists are fond of saying when they debate creationists, calling evolution by natural selection “just” a theory misunderstands the extent to which a scientific theory can be so strongly supported that it is for practical purposes a fact. To learn physics is to learn physical theory — the theory of universal gravitation, theories of motion and optics. What else would you teach your intro students if not this? Theory is inseparable from the field.
In sociology, on the other hand, theory is an oddball specialty. The first extensive exposure most of our undergraduates have to it is in their third year in college, when they take a course (or, sometimes, two) in “sociological theory.” Those who go on to graduate school might take another such course, with lengthier readings, in their first year. Most who go on to be sociologists will never teach a theory course, nor will they read the few specialty journals with “theory” in their titles. The content of these journals, like most of the ideas they learned in their theory courses will have little tangible impact on any research they conduct or any of the subjects they teach.
What has led to this curious state of affairs?
Part of the answer is that most sociological theory doesn’t have a clear use. And, as sociologist George Homans argued back in 1967, the reason for this is that most sociological theory doesn’t explain anything.
What exactly does it mean to explain something? I’ll save the detail on that for later, but, in short: To answer a “why” question. Slightly less short: To propose relationships that tell us why things vary the way they do, such as why suicide rates are higher in time 1 than time 2, or why a machine that was chugging along yesterday is a broken heap today.
Much of what gets taught as “theory” does not do this. It cannot tell you why wars an revolutions happen, why crime goes up or down, or why the price of coal is different here than there. Such theory contains no explanation.
If a lot of sociological theories aren’t explanations, then just what are they?
Here I’m going to lay out some major types of “theory” commonly taught in sociology. I’m using categories I learned from sociologist Donald Black when I was a student (my view of theory, and thus this whole series, is heavily based on his course “Sociological Explanation”). To some extent these categories overlap with the distinctions made by other sociologists like Jonathan Turner (see here , and also this guy).
History of Theory
A lot of what the average student learns in their required theory course is intellectual history. Most programs have a course in “classical theory,” sometimes paired in sequence with “contemporary theory.” In classical theory students get taught about the founding of the field, and about the lives, times, and corpus of work of some its early influential figures. The “Big Three” covered in most classical theory courses are Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim. It winds up being something between a “great books” course and a hagiography of the saints.
I still remember the opening line of one of the essays I wrote for my undergraduate theory course: “Karl Marx was born in the German town of Trier in 1818 . . .”
The focus on the individual thinker is notable. It pervades a lot of theory education, even classes not focused on the holy trinity of founders. Often when people find out I’m teaching a theory course, their first question is “Oh, who are you covering?”
Who, not what. It says a lot about how they approach theory.
Metatheory
Some of what students have to learn in their theory courses is better classified as philosophy than empirical science. For instance, depending how in-depth their classical theory teacher goes, they might have to grok Marx’s view of human nature — his understanding of what makes humans a “species being.” And since he was at least as much of an ideologue as a social scientist, they also get to learn his ethical pronouncements and political program (“Workers of the world, unite!”). But the kind of philosophy one most often gets in theory courses is philosophy of science.
A lot of what is commonly called theory is actually metatheory — not theory itself, but a discussion about theory and how theory should be done (kind of like the one we’re having now).
People who do theoretical work tend to have some strong opinions about how to go about it and are prone to argue for one way versus another. You see this in other fields, too. One famous example is the debate between physicists Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein, sparked by Einstein’s objection to quantum theory.
Sociology is unusual, though, in just how much metatheoretical debate it produces. It’s an extremely diverse and fragmented field. Historian and philosopher Thomas Kuhn long ago observed that when a field is divided into competing intellectual schools, a big chunk of their output is arguing against the foundations of the other schools and defending the foundations of their own.
The variety of ideas about what sociology should be and how it should be done go back to the beginning of the field, and so students also read about these arguments in their classical theory courses. A lot of what the Max Weber and Emile Durkheim wrote was an attempt to define the field of sociology, give it a mission, and say what distinguished it from history or psychology. They disagreed on such basic things as whether sociology could formulate general laws and whether it should focus on individuals or collectivities. These and other debates have continued ever since.
These arguments are far from trivial: For the scientist qua scientist, there is no more important question than how one should go about doing science. But a discussion of how to do sociology isn’t sociology, and a lot of sociology students don’t pick up on the distinction.
Conceptual Theory
Donald Black defines conceptual theory as providing the language and perspective used to study reality. This is where we get our concepts, terminology, classifications, and measurements.
A lot of what students get in their classical theory course is also conceptual theory. Sometimes they have to read Max Weber’s “Fundamental Concepts of Sociology,” a long dry list of definitions of various things – types of behavior, types of organization, and so on. Or they are taught his famous typology of authority – he classified authority based on its source of legitimacy, whether it be the charisma of the leader, a devotion to tradition, or a belief in the legitimacy of abstract rules.
Some celebrated theorists produce almost nothing but conceptual theory. For example, Erving Goffman is renowned in large part because he invented new ways of discussing and classifying the behavior of persons in face-to-face interaction (see, for example, this book). He often used the language of theatrical performance to do this. Viewing everyone as actors trying to give the proper impression to their audience, he would distinguish an interaction’s “front stage” from its “back stage” or talking about how multiple people can make up a “performance team.” He was good at identifying and naming things that often go unnoticed in everyday life because most people navigate interaction through intuition.
There’s nothing inherently unscientific about conceptual theory: Creating new concepts has played a major role in the history of science. Thomas Kuhn argued that major scientific discoveries involve not just observing something (“hmm, marks on these photographic plates”) but also coming to conceive of the observation as a new phenomenon (“I’m seeing a new form of radiation – let’s call it X-rays!”).
Scientific advances might also rely on finding new ways to conceptualize known things. Whereas Newton conceptualized gravity as a force travelling across the space between objects, Einstein conceptualized it as a curvature in the fabric of space itself. All those amazing but accurate predictions his theory of general relativity depended on creative new ways of conceptualizing the world.
Sometimes advances come when we learn to make distinctions between things that we previously lumped together, or when we create a category to lump together things that were previously seen as distinct. Both were important at various points in the study of electricity and magnetism, culminating in Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism, which treats both as different aspects of the same fundamental force.
The list of examples could go on, but the point is that yes, developing new concepts is important for science. But notice that the importance depends on being able to actually do something with the darned things.
The problem with so much conceptual theory in sociology is that it’s not clear what one is supposed to do with it. It doesn’t come packaged with an explanation or practical application. It doesn’t appear to solve any problems. What does one do with Weber’s long list of definitions? One hardly sees most of them outside of theory courses.
Purely conceptual theory, divorced from explanation, is common enough in sociology that sometimes people think classifying something is the same as explaining it.
“We can explain this with Durkheim’s concept of organic solidarity.”
“You mean we can classify it as an example of organic solidarity?”
“What?”
“My doctor can classify my skin rash as dermatitis, but that doesn’t tell me what caused it or how to get rid of it.”
Paradigms
Part of the reasons for the large amount of metatheory in sociology is that it lacks a unified paradigm of the kind that Kuhn said was so important for rapid scientific advance. Instead we have multiple competing approaches and schools of thought, each trying to justify itself and/or critique the others. Kuhn would say sociology is a field without a paradigm, but it would be more accurate to say it has many.
Often sociologists use the term “theory” to describe these paradigms. We thus speak of rational choice theory, conflict theory, and so forth. But none of these are singular theories of X, Y, or Z; they are families of theories that all share the same paradigm. And a paradigm is something much more abstract than a theory: It is a framework or strategy that can guide the construction of a theory.
There is not one rational choice theory, but many of them, addressing many subjects. They share many assumptions, such as the idea that people are basically self-interested. They also share some concepts, such as cost and incentive. Most of all they share a general strategy of trying to explain behavior in terms of how different variables shape people’s incentives to act this way or that.
Sociologists sometimes speak of rational choice theory explaining this or that, or of evidence supporting or opposing rational choice. This sows confusion, as only a specific theory can explain anything, and only a specific explanation can be supported or contradicted by evidence.
Indeed, we might have two competing explanations that both share the paradigm, as when two economists disagree on what caused unemployment to go down, but both offer explanations in terms of rational actors responding to market incentives. If one of these explanations turns out to be wrong, it doesn’t disprove the entire approach, for the other one might still turn out to be right.
And there’s no a priori way to tell whether someone can use an approach to come up with a successful theory at some point in the future — we can doubt it if the track record is poor, but we can only know for sure once someone does it.
Explanations
Many things that get called “theory” don’t explain anything. So what counts as an explanation?
Explanation in the scientific sense of the word means saying why the facts are the way they are. Why do we have two high tides a day instead of one or zero? Why do some people commit crimes and others do not? Why does the price of a commodity rise and fall over time?
We answer these why questions by positing relationships between things. That is, we state a relationship between the thing we’re explaining and some other aspect of reality. Why two tides a day rather than one or zero? Because the moon exerts a gravitational pull on the seas, resulting in a relationship between the tide and the moon: We get a high tide when the moon is directly overhead or directly on the other side of the earth; given the speed the moon orbits, this happens about twice a day. Why do some people commit crime while others do not? Criminologists propose various relationships – for instance, there is evidence that people with lower levels of self-control are more likely to commit various kinds of crime, as well as other risky behaviors. Why do the prices of commodities go up and down? There’s a relationship between price and supply – all else equal, the greater the supply, the lower the price. So if supply goes up, then price goes down.
Statements that specify a relationship between two things are propositions. They are also called hypotheses, principles, or laws — depending on their level of generality and how confident we are that they are true.
Such propositions make up the core of any explanatory theory, and no body of ideas qualifies as an explanation unless it contains at least one proposition (see Braithwaite 1953; Homans 1967). A theory that explains things has propositions, and a single proposition can qualify as a theory.
As sociologist Donald Black puts it, an explanation is the act of ordering facts with propositions (see Black 1995). The proposition shows how this fact fits in relation to other parts of reality. It makes the fact predictable, and so answers our “why” question.
We can have propositions that only address as single specific incident: A happened because B happened. Why did the dinosaurs go extinct? Physicist Luis Alvarez and colleagues famously proposed a relationship between the extinction and an asteroid impact. But scientists often seek general propositions that can apply to a whole class of events. Not just why the French Revolution happened, but what in general makes a revolution more likely; not just why Bill Jenkins developed lung cancer, but what in general causes lung cancer.
Notably, propositions of these sort must articulate the exact nature of the relationship — at the very least, whether the correlation is positive or direct (more of one thing is associated with more of the other) or negative (more of one thing is associated with less of the other). Anything falling shorter of that, say, by merely stating that one thing has some unspecified influence on another, doesn’t really explain anything.
George Homans called the latter kind of idea an orienting statement to distinguish it from true propositions, and noted that sociological theory is full of them. They amount to a suggestion that: “X is important, if you want to understand Y, study the influence of X.” They are best classed as metatheory rather than explanatory theory.
General propositions that actually specify relationships between two things are of great use; they can summarize and make sense of a pattern of facts, while also allowing us to make predictions about the world. If X causes Y, and we want to stop Y, stop X.
It is the predictive nature of general explanatory theory also allows us to gauge the likely consequences of our actions, and so we can apply such theory to find effective interventions and solve practical problems. It is what makes engineering possible.
Next in series: Part 2: Styles of Explanation. Followed by Part 3: The Deductive Model. Part 4: Testability. Part 5: Handling Anomalies. Part 6: Paradigms.
If you want to skip the philosophy of science and get straight to theories that purport to explain things, start with Part 7: Phenomenology. Followed by Part 8: Motivational Theory, Part 9: Opportunity Theory.
For paid subscribers, I have installments with teaching materials. See Part 4.5: Teaching Testability, Part 6.5: Exercises on types of theory, propositions, and deducing predictions, and Part 8.5: Exercises on applying and evaluating phenomenological and motivational theories.
If you’d like to support Bullfish Hole you can leave a one-time tip at this Stripe link (or this Paypal link). Or you can become a paid subscriber at the link below: