A POPPERIAN CRITIQUE OF JEAN-CLAUDE PASSERON’S ‘SOCIOLOGICAL REASONING (Atena Editora)

Abstract

In the book: “O Raciocínio Sociológico: o espaço não popperiano do raciocínio natural”, french sociologist Jean-Claude Passeron states that the structural use of natural language in the social sciences creates what he calls “sociological reasoning”, a necessary method based on natural reasoning where the “demarcation” and “falsifiability” of Popper and the “paradigms” and “normal science” of Kuhn would not be possible. This article proposes to analyze the empirical foundations of three statements deduced from the propositions that make up the French author's thesis, namely, that each science has its own language from which its specific type of knowledge and empirical evidence derives, that the use of natural language prevents the creation of “paradigms” and the accumulation of knowledge in sociology and, finally, that the use of natural language favors the carrying out of observations and prevents the carrying out of experiments. The fact that such statements are logically deducible from Passeron's propositions allows their empirical relevance to be tested using a method inspired by Karl Popper's ideas, consisting, in this case, in the presentation of empirical examples that contradict them. The results allow us to conclude that if there are difficulties in social sciences, especially in consolidating paradigms, in accumulating knowledge and in carrying out experiments, such difficulties cannot be attributed to the use of natural language.