Dick,
You write “My criticism of some of my fellow sociologists is that their central model or prototype of a scientific inquiry comes from inquiries that have produced the classical laws of physics.”
My criticism is not so much that sociologists seek to produce classical laws but rather that they don’t know what a classical law is and don’t know what a physicist is doing when they discover a classical law. Sociologists tend to caught up in some form of statistical analysis thinking that when they can generalise their analysis to other populations, they have produced a ‘classical law’. When they are doing this they are generalising place/time associations between elements. Insight is involved here but it is not the insight that gives rise to classical laws.
A classical law, however, is discovered in the creative moment of insight when the intelligibility of something is grasped, when this whole and its elements are systematically related to one another (or, what I call a theory - it is abstract, invariant, universal and normative). The key thing here is the grasp of systematic relationships. In other words, (i) these elements are the significant, essential and relevant ones – the insignificant, unessential and irrelevant elements are thereby excluded; (ii) the elements and their relationships together constitute this something.
Classical laws are answers to what-is-it questions. So a mathematician asks what is circle? and discovers through the creative moment of insight that it is constituted by certain elements which are systematically related to one another, viz. “a locus of coplanar points equidistant from a centre” (Insight 31). In this creative moment, they leave aside as insignificant, unessential and irrelevant the size of the circle, the different planes in which a circle can be drawn, the ‘dimensions’ of the central point and the coplanar points.
In a similar way, the sociologist can ask what is a society? what is sociality? What is an organisation? What is an economy? Etc. and discover the set of systematic relationships that constitute it, i.e. the set of sets of activities and practices that constitute a society – a theory of society etc. They can leave aside the interests, motivations, attitudes, beliefs etc. of social agents (whether individuals, groups or institutions). Unfortunately, it is the occurrence of these and their associations with something else (‘discovered’ through statistical analysis) that tend to be the focus of too many sociologists. (By the way, in my view, Lonergan outlines his theory of society on page 47-52 of Method as he explains the diagram on p.48)