14 - Social Facts or Social Phenomena?

Summary

On Durkheim's own account then, at least in so far as he discusses this point in the introductory chapter to The Rules, ‘facts’ and ‘the social’ – and hence social facts – seem to be one and the same thing, so much so that once one has explained one thing (the social), Durkheim seems to think that we know all that there is to say about the other thing (facts). On this reading a ‘social fact’ would seem to be anything that may be called ‘social’ in Durkheim's restricted sense of this term, and once we know what the ‘social’ is in this restricted sense we understand what a fact is as well and hence what a ‘social fact’ is. But this is where I wish to suggest that even a fairly rudimentary understanding of Immanuel Kant's concept of the term ‘phenomenon’ might be helpful to us in giving a more detailed idea of what Durkheim means when he says that a social fact is a living thing in its own right. And this is where the above references to this term that I have highlighted in italics in chapter 13 of this study, which Durkheim has presented to us as a discussion of the concept of ‘social facts’, comes into the question we are considering here.