Faculty Member Takes New Approach to Relating Academic Theories

A University College assistant professor's 1990 doctoral dissertation -- now extensively revised and expanded -- is the talk of academics in sociology, philosophy and globalization 12 years later, as Blasco Sobrinho's work was published as the book, Signs, Solidarities & Sociology: Charles S. Peirce and the Pragmatics of Globalization (Rowan & Littlefield).

Sobrinho, an assistant professor for the department of humanities and social sciences at University College, takes a different approach to relating the theories of "the founder of sociology," Emile Durkheim, and the "founder of American pragmatism," philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, and applying that viewpoint to the world events of the last decade such as the fall of the Soviet Union or the "global upsurge of religious fundamentalisms."

Sobrinho's interest in the research stemmed from a famous series of lectures Durkheim gave in 1913-1914, which were first published in the 1950s under the title of Pragmatism and Sociology.

"Durkeim was examining how societies create their systems of classification. In other words, how societies construct their world views in such ways as to then be able to deduce which behavior is normatively acceptable and which behavior is not," Sobrinho explains.

"Durkheim was aware that the only philosophy that had extensively addressed this was question of knowledge-construction had been American pragmatism, and his very first lecture had tackled the apparent divergence between the views of the early pragmatists William James and Charles S. Peirce.

"Whereas Peirce had seen language itself as communally or socially constructed, the more famous James had veered towards the relativism of subjectivistic truth-construction. Peirce was therefore dismissed by Durkeim as a non-pragmatist within these same 1914-1914 lectures, where Durkheim had also rejected James' individualistic relativism as sociologically na‹ve."

Sobrinho, who earned his first doctorate in philosophy, insisted instead "on the almost total convergence between the 'social construction of meaning' views of Durkheim and of Peirce, a convergence Durkeheim himself had missed because he had not understood the 'linguistic turn' in contemporary philosophy which Peirce had so insightfully anticipated. It is this Peirce-Durkheim convergence," argues Sobrinho, "that may be the cornerstone of a truly global sociology which better explains how the terms of one culture's terminology translates into another's." The original dissertation earned Sobrinho a doctorate in sociology from the University of Pittsburgh.

Sobrinho's work applies his Peirce-Durkheim convergence theory to current processes of globalization by examining the writings of postmodernists and arguing for the possibility of the contemporary geopolitical world-order having broken into "four semantic regions of mutually misunderstanding cultures."