Jean-Michel Berthelot was a French

French people

The French are a nation that share a common French culture and speak the French language as a mother tongue. Historically, the French population are descended from peoples of Celtic, Latin and Germanic origin, and are today a mixture of several ethnic groups...

 sociologist, philosopher, epistemologist and social theorist, specialist in philosophy of social sciences, history of sociology

History of sociology

Sociology emerged from enlightenment thought, shortly after the French Revolution, as a positivist science of society. Its genesis owed to various key movements in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of knowledge. Social analysis in a broader sense, however, has origins in the common stock...

, sociology of education

Sociology of education

The sociology of education is the study of how public institutions and individual experiences affect education and its outcomes. It is most concerned with the public schooling systems of modern industrial societies, including the expansion of higher, further, adult, and continuing...

, sociology of knowledge

Sociology of knowledge

The Sociology of knowledge is the study of the relationship between human thought and the social context within which it arises, and of the effects prevailing ideas have on societies...

, sociology of science and sociology of body.

Epistemology and history of sociology

Berthelot's philosophy and history of social sciences was influenced by Kant

Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....

, French historical epistemology of Bachelard

Gaston Bachelard

Gaston Bachelard was a French philosopher. He made contributions in the fields of poetics and the philosophy of science. To the latter he introduced the concepts of epistemological obstacle and epistemological break...

, Canguilhem

Georges Canguilhem

Georges Canguilhem was a French philosopher and physician who specialized in epistemology and the philosophy of science .-Life and work:...

, Koyré

Alexandre Koyré

Alexandre Koyré , sometimes anglicised as Alexander Koiré, was a French philosopher of Russian origin who wrote on the history and philosophy of science.-Life:...

 and Gaston Granger

Gilles-Gaston Granger

Gilles Gaston Granger , is an analytic philosopher.His works discuss the philosophy of logics, mathematics, human and social sciences, Wittgenstein, Aristotle, and Jean Cavaillès. He produced the authoritative translation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus into French...

, the falsifiability

Falsifiability

Falsifiability or refutability of an assertion, hypothesis or theory is the logical possibility that it can be contradicted by an observation or the outcome of a physical experiment...

 of Popper

Karl Popper

Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH FRS FBA was an Austro-British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics...

 and Lakatos

Imre Lakatos

Imre Lakatos was a Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science, known for his thesis of the fallibility of mathematics and its 'methodology of proofs and refutations' in its pre-axiomatic stages of development, and also for introducing the concept of the 'research programme' in his...

 and the epistemological reflections of sociologists, from Durkheim

Émile Durkheim

David Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology.Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain...

, Weber

Max Weber

Karl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber was a German sociologist and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself...

 and Simmel

Georg Simmel

Georg Simmel was a major German sociologist, philosopher, and critic.Simmel was one of the first generation of German sociologists: his neo-Kantian approach laid the foundations for sociological antipositivism, asking 'What is society?' in a direct allusion to Kant's question 'What is nature?',...

 to Passeron, Adorno

Theodor W. Adorno

Theodor W. Adorno was a German sociologist, philosopher, and musicologist known for his critical theory of society....

 and Habermas

Jürgen Habermas

Jürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theory on the concepts of 'communicative rationality' and the 'public sphere'...

.

Jean-Michel Berthelot's epistemological work combined the philosophy and history of science in the study of sociological theories

Sociological theory

In sociology, sociological perspectives, theories, or paradigms are complex theoretical and methodological frameworks used to analyze and explain objects of social study. They facilitate organizing sociological knowledge...

 to understand the logic of construction and justification

Theory of justification

Theory of justification is a part of epistemology that attempts to understand the justification of propositions and beliefs. Epistemologists are concerned with various epistemic features of belief, which include the ideas of justification, warrant, rationality, and probability...

 of sociological knowledge. Berthelot created a typology of sociological explanations, constituted by six logical schemas of intelligibility: causal, actancial, hermeneutic, structural, functionalist and dialectic. These types of explanation were the result of formalization of theory

Theory

The English word theory was derived from a technical term in Ancient Greek philosophy. The word theoria, , meant "a looking at, viewing, beholding", and referring to contemplation or speculation, as opposed to action...

 and arguments in the history of sociology.

Berthelot, at the same time, criticized the epistemic relativism and defended the pluralism and openness in sociology, which makes him, in the contemporary debate on philosophy of social sciences, a rationalist and constructivist

Constructivist epistemology

Constructivist epistemology is an epistemological perspective in philosophy about the nature of scientific knowledge. Constructivists maintain that scientific knowledge is constructed by scientists and not discovered from the world. Constructivists claim that the concepts of science are mental...

. The pluralism in sociology, in Berthelot's epistemology, is not only inevitably, but even fruitful for the research and theoretical debate.

Works

1. 1983 Le piège scolaire , Paris, PUF, 304 pages.
2. 1988 J.M. Berthelot ed., E. Durkheim, Les règles de la méthode sociologique, nouvelle édition critique avec notice biographique, index, variantes, précédée d'une étude originale, Les règles de la méthode sociologique ou l'instauration du raison-nement expérimental en sociologie, 60 p. Paris, Flammarion, coll. Champs.
3. 1991 La construction de la sociologie , Paris, PUF, collection Que-sais-je, 128 p., n° 2602. ( 5 ème éd. 2001).
4. 1995 Durkheim, l'avénement de la sociologie, Toulouse, PUM, 186 p.
5. 1996 Les vertus de l'incertitude. Le travail de l'analyse dans les sciences sociales, Paris, PUF, 271 p. Réedition "Quadrige-Essais Débats", 2004
6. 2000, Sociologie. Epistémologie d’une discipline. Textes fondamentaux, Bruxelles, De Boeck, 479 p.
7. 2000 La sociologie française contemporaine (sous la direction de), Paris, PUF, 2000, 274 p. Réédition Quadrige, 2001, 2003.
8. 2001 Epistémologie des sciences sociales (sous la direction de.), Paris, PUF, coll. 1er cycle, 600 p.
9. 2003 Figures du texte scientifique (sous la direction de ), Paris, PUF.
10. J.-M. Berthelot, O. Martin, C. Collinet, 2005, Savoirs et savants. Les études sur la science en France, Paris, PUF.