Abstract
This chapter discusses the methods and surprises of sociological theory. We examine five theoretical activities: (1) assembling key ideas, including the Mertonian starting ideas; (2) crafting postulates and establishing their properties; (3) deducing implications, including novel predictions; (4) linking individuals and societies, obtaining new probability distributions; and (5) unifying distinct theories. These activities require a body of methods, and they produce discoveries—the great surprises.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, Lazarsfeld (1975, esp. pp. 46-47) on the Theorie der Handlung and the theoretical foundations of empirical studies.
- 2.
See, for example, Wonnacott and Wonnacott (1979:34-35).
- 3.
Goods are things of which more is preferred to less; bads are things of which less is preferred to more. These preferences are observer-specific. For example, most people prefer more money to less, but there are famous exceptions (such as St. Francis of Assisi and St. Teresa of Ávila).
- 4.
Note, however, that goods and bads may operate differently, and less is known about bads than about goods, as discussed in Jasso (2017).
- 5.
Relations among the three associated functions in continuous univariate distributions are well known. The PDF is the first derivative of the CDF, and the CDF and QF are inverses of each other; thus, the QF is also called the inverse distribution function. The Engineering Statistics Handbook (U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology 2018) calls the QF the percent point function (PPF). Formulas and graphs for all three associated functions in the lognormal, Pareto, power function, and other variates are collected in Jasso and Liao (2003) and Jasso and Kotz (2008b:36-37).
- 6.
Augustine’s elegant definition of “people” was quoted in President Biden’s inaugural address on January 20, 2021. Together, Ideas #1 and #11 specify the earliest special case investigated mathematically in justice theory (Jasso 1980:9–10).
- 7.
Combined with the property that when the actual reward equals the just reward, the justice evaluation equals zero—known as the zero-point property—the Axiom of Comparison is sometimes called the general form of the JEF; the logarithmic form in equation (2.2) is then called the specific form of the JEF (Jasso 1999:138–139). Two ways in which the general form and the specific form differ are: First, the general form cannot yield a number for the justice evaluation (except in the case when the actual reward equals the just reward). Second, while the general form embeds only first derivatives (describing the direction of the effects of A and C on J, the specific form embeds as well second derivatives (describing the rate of change of the effects of A and C on J). Second derivatives become important in a new way in Sect. 2.7 on theoretical unification.
- 8.
Empirical work sometimes seems the natural habitat for discoveries and surprises. But it may be that they are hiding in plain sight in theoretical work.
- 9.
Interestingly, there was a literature in economics asserting that losses are felt twice as keenly as gains—that is, that the loss aversion ratio is constant at two—a literature based partly on empirical findings. The new link to the Golden Number suggests that experimenters, themselves unconsciously attracted to the Golden Number, may have unwittingly built research designs and experimental situations around an average hovering on the Golden Number.
- 10.
It might be said, colloquially and with exaggeration, “If it doesn’t exist in English, it doesn’t exist in sociology.”
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Jasso, G. (2021). The Methods and Surprises of Sociological Theory: Ideas, Postulates, Predictions, Distributions, Unification. In: Abrutyn, S., Lizardo, O. (eds) Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78205-4_2
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