Vers un naturalisme social

• Main Authors: Laurence Kaufmann, Laurent Cordonier
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Association Internationale des Sociologues de Langue Française 2011-10-01
• Series: Sociologies
• Subjects: culture; anthropoligical model; cognitive model; nature; natural sciences; social sciences
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/sociologies/3595

For sociologists, action explanation cannot rely on «the first nature» of the mind (the universal information processing that cognitive sciences claim to account for) but on its «second nature» (the more or less collective reasons for acting that furnish it). Even the most opposite sociological paradigms agree to see the social and the cultural as the result of a patient work of denaturalization that creates an irreducible gap between the reductive order of natural causes and the respectable order, either mental or social, of reasons, between the basic instincts of the body and the high-level logics of shared significations and cultural norms. Yet, the aim of naturalism is precisely to overcome the internal divide between humans and animals, between cultural history and biological history. It aims at bringing, in the sense of «making compatible», hypotheses and results of social sciences into line with those of natural sciences, an undertaking that prompts sociology to clarify and review the cognitive and anthropological models to which it implicitly refers. One of the potential contributions of cognitive sciences, and more generally, of naturalism is hence to improve, to replace or to falsify, in the Popperian sense of the term, cognitive models and anthropological conceptions on which social sciences rely.