Crisis in modern epistemology (Possible ways out) Chapter 6

Where does such a variety of currents and directions come from?

?Here everything already depends on the science itself, which underlies many methodological searches - biology, and social biology, in particular. Animal sociology, comparative psychology, socioecology, socioetology, genetics, ethology, experimental psychology. Through intensive field research, many theories have been developed that interpret and integrate an abundance of facts. Social biology is theoretically quite strict, and in some sections so much that it has reached the level of formalization. As such, theoretical social biology, as a unified theory, still does not exist. There are two very important reasons for this.

The first reason - the historical relationship of social biology with sociology and social philosophy - is a result of the expansion of evolutionary sociology. And this has left such an indelible imprint on the problems of sociobiology that until now its central problems remain the problems of biosocial evolution and social organization.

But it is precisely these questions that are fundamental both in the positive philosophy of O. Comte and in the evolutionary sociology of H. Spencer, and even earlier - the most important in the social philosophy of the 18th century.

The use of data from the sciences about nature and society in philosophy and sociology, as well as the idea of society as an integral social organism, was perceived and developed by the English thinker Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). In the works "Social Statics", "Foundations of Sociology", he developed an organic approach to society, drawing an analogy between a biological organism and society. He also interpreted the evolution of society by analogy with the evolution of a living organism and understood it as a natural process. Proceeding from the organismic approach, G. Spencer analyzed the role of the constituent parts of society, social institutions, showed their interrelation, revealed the movement of society as a movement from simple to complex, as a social pattern. G. Spencer is the founder of the organic school in sociology.

The essence of the organic theory of society lies in the fact that it solves the fundamental and urgent problem of the interaction of biological and social factors in the development of society. G. Spencer viewed society as a single system of interdependent natural - biological - and social factors. He believed that only within the framework of a holistic social-natural organism is the true meaning of any social institution and the social role of each subject manifested.

Social evolution is the progressive development of society along the path of its complication and improvement of the activities of social institutions. It shows the objective conditionality of social evolution by the needs of people. From the point of view of G. Spencer, in the process of social evolution, the importance of the collective activity of people and various kinds of social institutions increases.

Through the representative of social philosophy Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), the ideas of H. Spencer began to be actively used by all thinkers of the West. G. Spencer recognizes the importance of indirectly accepted premises of all knowledge, which are the concentration of human experience in the course of evolution. These prerequisites in relation to each person appear as a kind of a priori. For H. Spencer, scientific knowledge turns out to be a procedure for identifying similar signs of phenomena and discarding dissimilar ones. He believed that after Charles Darwin biology ousted mathematics, becoming a leading and exemplary science. Spencer transfers many of the provisions of the biological theory of evolution to society, developing the point of view of social Darwinism, which had many followers. Spencer's methodological approach to social processes is structural and functional.

The second reason is that, despite all the fidelity to philosophical problems, social biology began to orient itself rather early on the theory and methodology of natural science. This striving, quite understandable for the era of the triumph of positive science, was that underwater rock against which all attempts to create a “natural” theory of social biology are broken.