From Theory to Theorizing

Richard Swedberg

Since the mid-twentieth century the social sciences have made great advances in the kind of methods that they use. In the area of theory, however, the situation is quite different. The development since World War II has been quite uneven in this respect; sociologists and other social scientists are today very methodologically competent, but considerably less skillful in the way they handle theory. The major journals contain many solidly executed articles, though creative and theoretically sophisticated articles are less common.

Why is this the case? And can the situation be changed? Can the theory part be brought up to par with the methods part in today's social science? One answer that I suggest we may want to explore is the option of placing more emphasis on theorizing than on theory; and in this way start to close the gap between the two.

Roughly speaking, the expression "to theorize" refers to what one does to produce a theory and to the thought process before one is ready to consider it final. While theorizing is primarily a process, theory is the end product. The two obviously belong together and complement each other. But to focus mainly on theory, which is what is typically done today, means that the ways in which a theory is actually produced are often neglected. This is true both for the individual researcher and for social science as a whole.

Emphasizing the role of theorizing also has huge consequences for the way that theory is taught, a topic that is of great importance and deserves a volume of its own. For example, when sociological theory is often taught today, the student gets to know what Durkheim, Weber, Bourdieu, and others said—knowledge that will supposedly come in handy once the student undertakes future research projects. But teaching theorizing is very different; here the goal is for the student to learn to theorize on his or her own. The point is to learn to develop theories for one's own empirical work, not just use someone else's ideas.

The emphasis on each individual doing his or her own theorizing means that each individual must draw on his or her unique set of knowledge and experience. I refer to the central role of the individual in the theorizing process as personalism; the term refers to the fact that theorizing will only be successful if one delves deeply into one's own self and experiences. You have to know theory to theorize, but to theorize well you also need to relate to it in a personal way.

Also, just as the individual is always exposed to the risk of failing when he or she does anything authentic, the same is true for theorizing (Kierkegaard [1846] 1962). Repeating other people's theory entails little risk, unlike theorizing on one's own. This is part of the meaning of Weber's statement that "the scientific worker has to take into his bargain the risk that enters into all scientific work: Does an 'idea' occur or does it not?" (Weber 1946: 136).

There exist many ways of theorizing, including induction, deduction, generalizing, model-building, using analogies, and others. Some of these, I argue, are especially useful for theorizing in sociology and social science. In discussing and presenting the different types of theorizing I will often use the work of Charles S. Peirce as my guide. The writings by Peirce, especially "How to Theorize" and "Training in Reasoning," are extremely suggestive for theorizing (e.g., Peirce 1934, 1992d/1998). I have similarly found many relevant insights in cognitive science.

But it is also clear that much of what has been written on theorizing has been forgotten and that no one has tried to pull together the most important texts or tried to piece together the tradition of theorizing that I have attempted to describe in this introductory chapter. The writings that do exist are scattered throughout the enormous literature in social science, in autobiographical accounts by social scientists, and in their correspondence.

Finally, throughout this chapter I point out the many obstacles that currently exist to creative theorizing. These epistemological obstacles, as I will call them (following Gaston Bachelard), are of different kinds (see, e.g., Bachelard [1934] 1984). Some of them make it hard to deal effectively with data in the process of theorizing. Others encourage the social scientist to rely far too much on existing theory and skip the element of theorizing or reduce it to a minimum.

The Distinction between the Context of Discovery and the Context of Justification

In approaching the topic of theorizing in social science, it is convenient to take as one's point of departure the well-known distinction in the philosophy of science between the context of discovery and the context of justification. In doing so, it is possible to show that both the current neglect of theorizing and the related overemphasis on theory have much to do with the tendency in today's social science to largely ignore the context of discovery, and instead to focus most of the attention on the context of justification.

The distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification received its most influential formulation in the 1930s through the work of Hans Reichenbach and Karl Popper. Today the distinction is still around, even if it has been criticized over the years and is far from generally accepted (Hoyningen-Huene 1987; Schickore and Steinle 2006). It should be pointed out that the argument in this chapter does not rest on the notion that these two concepts are each other's absolute opposites or that there exists a sharp conceptual line between the two. Nonetheless, the distinction represents a useful point of departure for the discussion.

Both Reichenbach and Popper worked on ways to improve empiricism as a philosophy of science. Reichenbach coined the terms "context of discovery" and "context of justification," while Popper helped to diffuse them by giving them a central place in his influential work The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Popper 1935: 4–6; Popper 1959: 31–32, 315; Reichenbach 1938: 6–7, 281; Reichenbach 1951: 231). Both used the distinction primarily with the natural sciences in mind, not the social sciences.

Reichenbach defined the context of discovery as "the form in which [thinking processes] are subjectively performed," and the context of justification as "the form in which thinking processes are communicated to other persons" (Reichenbach 1938: 6). While science can address...