THE THOUGHTWAYS OF CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY.

This article focuses on the survival in the social sciences of a linguistic technique and a logic which are as inadequate for the solution of present scientific problems as the mechanical tools of medieval man would be inadequate for the needs of the industrial age. The best general illustration of the phenomenon here under consideration is, of course, furnished by the history of the repeated departures from Aristotelian logic in the physical sciences. More recently the idea has taken hold that, whereas logic is usually assumed to be the science concerned with the phenomenon of thought in general, actually this is the province of psychology. Logic from this point of view becomes merely the rules by which one deals with the data of logic, namely, words. This in turn means that the postulates and rules constituting a system of logic may be indefinitely varied so as to be compatible with our observations. In short, any system of logic is justifiable or true if it provides a set of postulates which are internally consistent, that is, from which propositions can be deduced without contradiction. It is precisely this practice which has marked the great epochs of science.