2.5. TetraSociology's methods
The issue of sociology's theoretical method arises as soon as some parameters/invariants of the social world get pointed out. The pointing out of SST coordinates and the social's components makes it necessary to theoretically construct relations between them. Initially, methods of theoretical construction rested on principles of action and interaction. Elaborating the notion of social interaction, T.Parsons formulated the principle of phenomena's interpenetration[1]. TetraSociology accepts this principle while adding a requirement of approaching all social connections not only as interpenetrative but also as totally interinclusive. Each social interaction represents a multidimensional inclusion of every one of its element, as a part, into every other, as a whole. Interinclusion is based on the "whole-part" relation - the principle of "matryoshka". Interinclusion is universal and applies to all the co-phenomena, parameters and coordinates of the social world and all the social's components. This is the only way to understand their indissolubility, the impossibility of them existing separately and outside each other. Because they all are forms of people's reproductive employment and social time, their indissolubility rests on the interinclusion of time of employment and people's life: the life of modern people, in some aspects, incorporates the results of past generations' life, while in other aspects, it is incorporated into them. Parents' life/time incorporates children's life/time and vice versa. Interinclusion of the equally necessary invariant parameters of the social world excludes the "primal/secondary" relation between them: this is why interinclusion is perceivable only by a pluralistic sociology, and not by a monistic one, which does not go further than simple interaction.
Interinclusions are not only universal: they also vary with regards to priority ranking, shifts in "whole-part" roles of the social's different components, different SST coordinates and different co-phenomena. Thus, TetraSociological method is the method of variable interinclusion of the social's components, all co-phenomena and all their parameters. It has several systemic qualities exploring which goes beyond this book's scope: it is pluralistic, dialectical, hierarchic, reversible, emergent, continual. It requires recognition of supplementation, and not exclusivity, of the social world's phenomena: interinclusion is supplemental, not exclusive.
Variable interinclusion is a theoretical method. It is a means of getting theoretical information - the means adequate to TetraSociology's pluralistic content. In TetraSociology, empirical methods providing empirical information consist in a new, sociological macrostatistics of sphere indices, as well as new information technology based on it which are explored below. The SST parameters in TetraSociology (coordinates, constants, components of the social, sphere indices) are global-scale empirical variables, which presence or absence in each case can be empirically established and measured. TetraSociology's empirical methods include empirical sociology's traditional methods: observation, polls, etc. Both new methods and the traditional ones, transformed by TetraSociology, create a special form of empirical sociology, which can be called "tetraempiric". They lay the foundation for postpluralism's "neoempirism". Tetraempirism is defined by four dimensions of the sociology's empirical variables: statics, dynamics, structuratics, genetics. Thus, TetraSociology represents a methodological synthesis of theoretical and empirical sociologies resting on postpluralistic multidimensional foundation. The synthesis of methods transforms both. It creates pre-conditions for turning TetraSociological theory into an experiment-based and exact science and empirical studies into a single empirical basis for theory, overcoming their lack of significance, parochialism and disconnection.
[1] Parsons T. The Social System. N.Y., 1964 (1st ed. 1951), p. 15-17.
