SEHR, volume 4, issue 2: Constructions of the Mind
Updated 4 June 1995 the hume machine can association networks do more than formal rules? introduction The study of science and technology by social scientists has led some of us to develop a theory of the growth of socio-technical imbroglios in terms of associations. how can we give qualitative analyses in social science mechanical means for dealing with large bodies of heterogeneous data? Despite contemporary progress in statistics, the social sciences are still too divided between quantitative and qualitative methods. To take a few examples, economics, electoral sociology, demography and "cliometry" (the French word for quantitative history) have at their disposition a number of mathematical tools and appropriate databases. The same cannot be said for anthropology, for numerous branches of history, for field studies in sociology and for symbolic interactionism. This difference of methods and tools is at once the cause and the consequence of several other divisions between macroscopic analyses and analyses of individual interactions, between explanations in terms of structure and explanations in terms of circumstances. Despite the presence of tools developed in part for sociologists-like factorial analysis-the progressive passage from global to local analyses never seems to get any easier. This division is particularly deleterious for those who use the notion of network in order to account for multiplicity, heterogeneity, and the variability of associations responsible for the solidity of a fact, a technical object, a cultural feature, or an economic strategy. Such studies are not at ease either with quantitative methods, which do not follow the network faithfully enough, or with simple ethnographic descriptions (case studies), which do not enable one to tie a given case study to any other. But at the same time, there is no way of charting a network by choosing a median solution and projecting it-by correspondence analysis, for example-onto a common statistical space. In so doing, one would lose the advance that constitutes the idea of networks: the possibility | |
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