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The place of the sciences of man in the system of sciences 21
ments of the mercury up and down the tube, which are independent of the
subject (despite the fact that he has selected this phenomenon as significant and
built the apparatus), but also a whole system of measurements calling for
logical categories, order, number, the division of spatial continuity, the grouping
of movements, the choice of a unit, etc. But the framework with which the
subject thus enriches the object, far from distorting it, forms a structure of
functional relations which enable him to identify the objective processes he is
seeking to discover. In the case of society as a whole, however, the problem is
far more complex, because the whole is not perceptible; the choice of the variables
or indicators used to portray and analyse it wil therefore depend on far
more complex intellectual activities on the part of the sociological subject than
with a physical measurement. These activities wil therefore be less quantifiable
as regards their capacity for objectivization or, alternatively, for distortion or
error.
In point of fact, there are only three major types of possible structurations of
the whole (see Chapter w.9, with many sub-varieties. That this is true in all
fields clearly demonstrates the existence of the factors of unconscious decision
and objectivizating, or conversely of distorting the assimilation of reality. This
leads us to assert that when a sociologist observes facts he always modifies
them, either by enriching, but not falsifying them, i.e. by using frameworks
which merely reproduce the objective links and make them conceptually acceptable,
or by forcing them into structures which ignore the essentials or more or
less systematically distort them. The three major types of structuration are:
additive or atomistic composition, in which society is conceived as a sum of
individuals already possessing the characteristics requiring explanation; emergence,
in which the whole as such generates new properties which are imposed
on the individuals; and relational totality, a system of interactions which modify
the individuals from the outset and also explain variations in the whole.6
Depending on the choice of model - a choice dictated, both involuntarily and
consciously, by general theoretical considerations and not only by the subject’s
education, which may be individualistic, authoritarian or other, according to
his social group - the facts observed are bound to be modified immediately
they are selected and throughout the structuration process, from identification
to interpretation. Consequently what Tarde takes as imitation is regarded by
Durkheim as a formative contraint, by Pareto as an expression of hereditary
instincts, and so on; what the idealist sees as the products of widely-held
group ‘doctrines’ are regarded by the Marxist as deep-seated conflicts, of which
the doctrines are merely a symbolic reflection and an ideological compensation ;
and so forth.
Nevertheless, just as introspective illusions obviously raise a problem of
fact, which as such concerns psychology, so the modifications induced in the
sociologist’s mind by the society which has shaped him, and the modifications
induced in the social material by the mind of the sociologist, whose task is to
structuralize that material, are social facts of interest to sociology in so far as it
is able to study them. Although the epistemological problem is therefore even
more complicated in sociology than in psychology, there is nothing insoluble