idealism

idealism A term used to refer to that position in the philosophy of the social sciences which assumes that the social world, like all other objects of external perception, consists of ideas originating from some source or other. Examples of such sources would be Hegel's ‘Geist’, Berkeley's God, or (most commonly in sociology) the minds of individual human beings. In other words, what idealism asserts ontologically is that society only exists in so far as human beings think that it exists. And what it asserts epistemologically is that the proper way to gain knowledge of society is through the investigation of this thinking.

The position set out by Peter Winch in his The idea of a Social Science (1958) comes closest to that of pure idealism in contemporary social science, although some versions of discourse analysis are also good approximations. More commonly, however, sociologists drawn to idealism have followed one of two courses: either they have based themselves on a synthetic ontology which assumes the coexistence of mental and material phenomena in the social world, and have combined this with a largely empiricist epistemology (as, some have argued, in the case of Max Weber); or, they have combined an idealist ontology with an empiricist stress on the epistemological primacy to be accorded to observation (as, perhaps, in symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology).