A Return to ‘the Inner’ in Social Theory: Archer’s ‘Internal Conversation’

Abstract

Like psychology, sociology is often infused with the idea of transforming itself into a genuine science by redesigning itself to conform to a generic model of what scientific explanation is supposedly like. In recent sociology and social psychology, a ‘realist’ understanding of science has provided a prominent platform for promoting the renewal of scientific ambitions in the ‘behavioural sciences’. As usual, the promised science does not soon materialize; its development is postponed until the problems involved in setting out how the proper form of scientific explanation actually works are sorted out. These conceptual problems involve not only issues about the nature of explanation, but also those found in philosophical psychology in relation to how conduct is to be brought within the explanatory scheme: how are the relations between ‘the inner’ and ‘the outer’, the ‘private’ and ‘the public’ to be encompassed within the scheme? These questions enter, no less awkwardly into sociological as they do into psychological deliberation, often in contexts bounded by the perceived opposition between mentalism and behaviourism, on the one hand, and between determinism and autonomy on the other. In sociology, one setting for these difficulties is the perennial controversy over the proportional contributions to behavioural outcomes made by ‘structure’ (the influence of pre-existing conditions) and ‘agency’ (individual spontaneity), where there are two (at least) contested inclinations involved in attempts to foreclose the difficulties: one, to doubt that individual decisions genuinely fix outcomes, and, two, to assume a ‘behaviourist’ conception of the mind as an exhaustively public phenomenon.