Sociology,history, and the abstract perspective

Our discussion is initiated as a response to the claim that sociologists should become “more historical” in their orientations. The issues are old, but every generation frames its own response. Our response is developed by appeal to intuitive convictions arising out of experience with mathematical models of social phenomena. We make a distinction between historical and sociological processes at a metaphysical level; that is, these two types of processes exemplify different categories of existence. Next we make this point of view concrete by using the idea of a model of social mobility as an example. The discussion then centers on problems related to the search for general laws. We frame a “fallacy of misplaced generality” and against this background discuss how the idea of scope conditions, used in conjunction with formal models, leads to a method for coping with the difficulties inherent in the effort to frame general sociological theories.