ABSTRACT
This chapter explains that, as Parsons pointed out, there is a fundamental tension in Durkheim's work between determinism and voluntarism, and between positivism and idealism, when it approaches the problem of discussing Durkheimian sociology of knowledge. To an important degree Durkheim developed his sociological theory within the context of two differentiated philosophical traditions. The correspondence theory of knowledge appears in the Rules in so far as Durkheim attempts to characterize scientific causality as a movement between the 'surface' and the 'essence' of reality. Durkheim and Marcel Mauss were dealing with secondary anthropological and ethnographical data about primitive systems of classification, in an attempt to demonstrate one aspect of Durkheim's thesis that society is the basis of the categories of understanding, hitherto allotted either to individual activity, empiricism or to inbuilt capacities of reason, as in rationalism. The chapter presents that, Durkheim takes the Australian aborigines to have the most primitive form of social organization and, consequently the simplest classificatory system.
