Abstract

The discussion of the thesis that sociology is reducible to psychology generally suffers from two short-comings: first, it is usually not stated what is to be understood by the generally imprecise terms 'sociology', 'psychology' and 'reduction'. But this is a prerequisite for discussing the reductionism thesis at all. Secondly, it is usually only asserted apodictically or at best illustrated by some examples that a reduction is possible, without any systematic test of the thesis. In this paper the authors try to avoid these short-comings. After having defined what they understand by 'sociology', 'psychology' and 'reduction' they reduce — in the sense defined — some central sociological terms like 'system', 'structure', etc. They then reduce some sociological to psychological statements and show the 'psychological' character of ecological, functional and contextual hypotheses. Finally, they deal with some consequences of the reductionism thesis for the advancement of theoretical sociology. The systematic test—which is reported much more extensively in another work not yet published — resulted in every case in a confirmation of the reductionism-thesis.1.