Le bêtisier du sociologue (which we can translate in English as The Sociologist Collection of Howlers)

Citation

Magne, L. (2010), "Le bêtisier du sociologue (which we can translate in English as The Sociologist Collection of Howlers)", Society and Business Review, Vol. 5 No. 2, pp. 217-219. https://doi.org/10.1108/17465681011055613

Nathalie Heinich is a sociologist teaching at l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and has done a lot of work in the field of art sociology. She also trains PhD students in sociology. She was confronted in numerous situations to flawed reasoning and, as a teacher and a researcher, she wanted to point those out, especially the typical one that came again and again. Thus, she began to take notes on these mistakes by professional or would be professional in sociology, notes which had finally grown up so much that it fills a whole book. There will be no second tome to supplement this one since stupidity is too time consuming and this book is implicitly dedicated to save our time by dissolving fallacies.

This book points out the mistakes we can make when talking about the society and is thus of interest for people interested in the link between society and business. This book also shows that trained sociologists errors are generally the same as the one committed by lay people, which imply that researchers and non researchers can benefit equally from it if they want to improve their reasoning and theories about the social world.

Heinich shows first that three words are often abused by people talking about social matters. The first one is society and is used in order to talk about the society as a whole and to utter general statement towards it, without consideration of the differences implied by its stratification and treating it as an objective entity per se and not, first and foremost, as a concept, which usually resorts to thinking by clichés. The second one is power, which is supposed to pervade everything and to be everywhere, without mentioning the power of whom, of what and on whom. The last one comes from Heinich field of specialty: art. A word broad and general enough to refer to many different things (works, artist, its public, etc.) and consequently able to sustain confusion about what is being really argued.

Then, the authors explains why one of the main flaws of reasoning is the belief in the fact that something is voluntarily hidden from us (which could be fascinating for some people for this reason) and could draw near to conspirationist theories, like “suspicion sociology” may do (some of Bourdieu's works for instance). Here, you want to make the actors confess their hidden motivations (they are not telling the truth), because there is some sort of implicit crime, usually against an idealised and anthropomorphic view of nature (embodying different values). This could lead to some kind of a theology of sociality.

In the following part, Heinich points out the different fallacies which are common in the medias and also in academic journals, especially the illusions due to the (ab)use of statistics and binary logic, the confusion between descriptive and prescriptive orders, the confusion about causality and correlation, without mentioning the oblivion of any kind of space and time context to theorize or understand the situation and the rejection of comprehensive sociology by some research groups, arguing that we must use quantitative and external data in order to be “scientific” (a perfect basis for a scientism perspective).

Subsequently, the author deals with other fallacies which are sometime not just mistakes but patent insincerity, especially when you mix up opinion polls and real sociological surveys, inferring about the society as whole or when you are overusing some academically fashionable words. Words like symbolic may be really chic but perfectly vain in respect to their contribution to the meaning of the theory. But one could also choose to bane some terminology from their vocabulary, for such terms as sex (vs gender), race, etc. could contribute to support hierarchy and thus inequalities (now growingly felt as a no more bearable fact) you will allegedly have to fight‐off.

If you have some ideas you want to “sell to the public” (political stance, ideology, doxa, etc.), you will consider sociology as an engaged scholarship and possibly as a “combat sport” where the questions of what is innate or what is acquired, or what is determined in the social world and what is not, will be a political resource in order to win your fight with more ideological concern than scientific commitment. Critical sociology, feminism, gender and cultural studies could not only be highly critical, but also sometimes without basic critical thinking, etc.

Theory sellers are prone to overlooking the real world and what people really do probably because this conceptualism is useful to sustain dogmas (like rational choice theory for example) which are necessary to delineate friends from foes in a field where affiliation to a specific research community (i.e. mostly clans) is a vital professional advantage. Its high price is, according to Heinich, conformism and vote‐catching practices resulting in a “I think like us” mindset, more dedicated to the expression of one's opinion rather than to the making of science, what is a shame.

In her interesting book, everyone can just try for himself the different mistakes the author is addressing and check if he is prone to one or several of them. One may learn a lot about key classical problems in simple social sciences reasoning. This pleasant book would be beneficial to people who want to understand and explain real social practices with a strong concern for genuine scientific inquiry (epistemological concern linked to robust theorizing) instead of school of thought affiliation and cross‐referenced exchanges of citations.

As Heinich put it, many fallacies are for sure missing from her book, including hers (and it appeared to me that she committed a few ones, along with expressions of what seemed to me more of an opinion than scientific propositions; but those were limited in number in the whole book and the examples were usually telling ones). She tackles her subject with an informal tone which contrasts with more arid classical epistemological literature, what makes the book more enjoyable. The drawback of this way of writing is the lack of a theory of errors that could be an helpful thread for the reader to give him a more progressive approach, which at times seems to be somehow messy, though structured.

In a nutshell, the author is stressing not often addressed elements which are highly relevant for society and business, which make her contribution a valuable insight for the research process and for people interested in critical thinking.