When social theorists undertake to define something, what are they doing from a conceptual point of view? I'm thinking of "big" social concepts, like capitalism, feudalism, fascism, democracy, or nationalism. How are the concepts the social theorists put forward thought to relate to the social world and its history? Here are a few conceptual attitudes that …
Causal mechanisms and scientific realism
From Social Epistemology ... (Editor’s Note: Johannes Persson’s article “Mechanistic Explanation in Social Contexts”, to which Daniel Little replies, appears in Social Epistemology 26.1 available through Taylor & Francis Online.) The social mechanisms approach to explanation (SM) has filled a very important gap in the theory of social explanation in the past twenty years, between …
Berger and Luckmann on conceptual relativism
image: The Bargeman, Fernand Léger (link) In their The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge Berger and Luckmann are interested in the ways that human beings cognitively represent the events, structures, and behaviors of "everyday life." They want to shed light on the cognitive frames in terms of which people organize the …
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Causal pathways through Coleman’s boat
image: illustration in Luiz Carlos dos Santos Azevedo, "Developing a Performance Measurement System for a Public Organization: A Case Study of the Rio de Janeiro City Controller’s Office" (link)A key talisman in discussions about the relation between "macro" and "micro" is a famous diagram by James Coleman inFoundations of Social Theory. The diagram is often …
Sociology of knowledge: Berger
I've treated several approaches to the sociology of knowledge in the past month. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann describe their book, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, as fundamentally a contribution to this subject as well. So this post will examine the assumptions they make about the topic. Berger and …
Defining a social subject: Weber
How does a sociologist define and conceptualize a subject for research and investigation? And how does a research tradition -- a group of scholars linked by training, scholarly interaction, and mentorship -- do the same thing? What is the intellectual work that goes into framing an empirical and theoretical conception of a group of related …
Intellectuals tell their stories
Since reading Neil Gross's book Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher I've been once again thinking about the ways that a given thinker takes shape throughout his or her life. (I touched on this question in a post several years ago on influences, and most recently in a post on Peter Berger.) There are a couple …
Making Peter Berger
Peter Berger declared himself a humanistic sociologist throughout much of his career, including in his important book with Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. This isn't exactly a common identification for an American sociologist in the 1950s. So how did he get there? This is an interesting question …
Epistemology naturalized and socialized
There has been a field of philosophy for quite a long time called "epistemology naturalized." (Here are good articles onnaturalized epistemology and evolutionary epistemology in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.) Putting the point simply, the goal of this field is to reconcile two obvious points: Human beings are natural organisms, with cognitive faculties that have resulted from …
Sociology of knowledge: Camic, Gross and Lamont
The sociology of knowledge has received a new burst of energy in the past few years, with quite a bit of encouragement and innovation coming from Science, Technology and Society studies (STS). (STS overlaps substantially with the SSK research tradition described briefly in an earlier post.) Charles Camic and Neil Gross have made very substantial contributions in …
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Understanding Society 