Can we see society ?
Micro and macro levels

HERMANN
ÉDITEURS
Depuis 1876
Pierre Moessinger Voir la société
9 782705 666743
978 2 7056 6674 3
24 €

What do we see when we observe society ? How should we look at social phenomena ?
What images do we give to ourselves ? The author shows where to look to see change,
cohesion, imitation, regularities, order or disorder.
This book leads to see society as based on human activities, it insists on the levels of
social reality, on micro-macro links, and aims at coordinating sociology and psychology.

Preface by Mario Bunge :

Pierre Moessinger has the unique distinction of having been Jean Piaget's last student, and of having continued and updated his work in developmental psychology and sociology, to which he has added social psychology. Moessinger's research, like his teacher's, is both rigorous and focused on important problems, in a field traditionally plagued by a combination of experimental rigor with triviality. Besides, Moessinger's writing is crystal-clear, a singular virtue at a time when postmodern nonsense can be combined with technical jargon to produce the illusion of profundity. Last, but not least, Moessinger is very clear about the philosophical presuppositions and impacts of scientific research, such as realism and the existence of objective regularities.
This book deals with a central problem of sociology, namely how best to "look" at society, which is imperceptible to the point that it has often been said not to exist. It is well known that, whereas methodological individualists claim that only individuals exist and can be studied, holists emphasize the existence of social wholes but deny that they can be understood by analyzing them into inter-related persons. By contrast, social psychologists like Moessinger, and the rare sociologist like Georg Simmel, know that it is wrong to dissociate person from society if only because every time an individual joins or leaves a social group he or she acquires new properties (which Moessinger calls microemergent), such as being employed or having changed political allegiance. Moessinger emphasizes that social systems, such as families and business firms, possess properties that their individual components lack, such as cohesiveness and division of labor–cases of macroemergence. Hence Moessinger's methodological thesis, that social psychologists should adopt an explicit systemic approach. That is, they should regard every individual as a comoponent of several social systems, each of which is characterized by global properties uknown to individual psychology. Thus the social psychologist starts neither at the microlevel nor at the macrolevel: he deals all the time with micro-macro relations: he explains microproperties with the help of macroproperties, and conversely.
Because social psychology bridges the micro to the macro, it can attempt to understand macrosocial events, such as social movements, in terms of individual behavior –the way Weber wanted. Likewise, that discipline can hope to explain microsocial events, such as divorcve and crime, with the help of macrosocial considerations–the way Durkheim wanted. Thus the two kinds of emergence, from micro to macro and conversely, can be accounted for, at least in principle, by the fusion of psychology with sociology. Hence the claim that each of them is independent of the other, as Pareto, Weber and Popper claimed, is only an obstacle to scientific progress. Nor is either discipline reeducible to the other: Fusion, rather than reduction, is the ticket. Similar disciplinary fusions have been occurring everywhere along with tghe splitting of disciplines : Witness physical chemistry, biochemistry, develomental evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, neurolinguistics, economic sociology, and criminal sociology. In all these cases convergence has the potential to explain what intradisciplinary research is impotent to explain. For instance, neoclassical microeconomics does not explain the fact that, in times of unemployment, wages do not go down the way the demand curve predicts. The psychoeconomist knows why: Employers are reluctant to abide by the law of the market in this case because they value the commitment of their employees to the firm–and sometimes also because they empathize with them. Thus, disciplinary convergence helps explain some anomalies and some cases of emergence. At all events, emergence ceases to be mysterious, and becomes instead one more scientific problem. I realize that the preceding is rather abstract, hence hardly didactic. It is not in Moessinger's style. In fact, this book is chock-full of examples taken from everyday life and current research, as well as suggestive analogies and metaphors. In fact, it starts by recalling the way our planet is seen by an asronaut, a line pilot flying at different altitudes, and finally a pedestrian. Only the latter can see distinctly fellow humans, or rather their exterior shape and overt behavior: he has to infer, or rather guess, their intentions. Nor can he perceive social systems: these, too, must be hypothesized. For instance, we do not see a factory, but only a building and its contents: the social organization and the technical operations must be investigated. And yet only such hypotheses can explain behavior. For example, when seeing someone running from A to B, we don't know whether she is fleeing from A or being drawn to B. Only further investigation may reveal the truth. And this research is expected to uncover the psychosocial mechanism of the running in question: self-preservation, hope of gain, imitation, struggle, cooperation, or what have you. In general, no mechanism, no explanation proper. And mechanisms, the processes that make systems tick, or else dismantle them, are imperceptible. Hence they must be guessed and described in theoreretical terms. But such guesses, if scientific, must be empirically testable. And remembering that tests are just as imperfect yet improvable as theories, one is led to view scientific research as a zig-zag between observation and theory. If you are a sociologist or a social psychologist in search of a useful metatheory, read this book. And read it if you are a philosopher looking for real cases of contemporary research in the light of an explicit rationalist, realist and systemic philosophy. In either case Voir la societe will help you understand the personal, the social, and their sciences and intersciences.