Social purity

Some conceptual and logical limits

Sverre Wide, Mälardalens högskola

Our experience and understanding (lay and professional) of social reality are, it seems, often plagued by indistinctness. Where, for example, should we draw the line between friendship and love, or between loyalty and submission? In real life those kinds of phenomena always seem to intermingle.

Now, one way of handling these difficulties (at least for the sociologist) would be to regard them as purely empirical (or accidental). Indeed, it seems plausible to argue that our world is (unfortunately?) too complex to fit the Idealtypen of our understanding; the complexity of the social realm in particular, blurs the conceptual strictness of our analytically clear distinctions and theories.

In this paper on socio-logic, I shall pursue another line of investigation. In fact, I attempt to show that not only are our social concepts (often) inherently equivocal; they must remain so if they are to grasp social reality. And further: this impurity could perhaps be understood as the essence of sociality as such. The sometimes heard plea for more rigorously defined concepts should, of course, not be neglected; it should be taken seriously enough to make us examine whether there exist different kinds of rigour.

Initially, I make a distinction between three kinds of concepts: technical, empirical and socio-logical, and they all differ as to their limits, their ways of being defined etc. Next, two sociological concepts, “trust” and “play”, are examined in order to determine their conceptual status. The question is raised whether pure trust and pure play are even conceptually conceivable. And if not, how are we to understand them? Finally, some possible consequences of this analysis for sociological research and theorising are discussed.