The Sociology of Knowledge in Weimar Germany: Its Background and Context i Any serious attempt to understand the distinctive nature of the German tradition ...

Two distinct attitudes have been adopted by investigators in the field of the sociology of knowledge. One of them may be called speculative; the other, empirical. The central interest of an investigator having the speculative attitude lies in developing a theory of the sociology of knowledge. The central interest of investigators having the empirical attitude lies in finding out or explaining concrete phenomena; the theory is employed, implicitly or explicity, for this purpose. The existence of the two attitudes (...) may be in part explained, as far as the German sociology of knowledge is concerned, by reference to the history of this school, which has grown out of and has been determined by a Marxist and materialistic philosophy, and especially by the use of this philosophy as a political instrument in the struggle of the emerging proletariat against the bourgeoisie. This statement, however, must be supplemented by a short location of the four most important contributors to the theory of the German sociology of knowledge. Max Scheler approaches the problem phenomenologically; he was the first and only one to ask the fundamental question, “What is knowledge?” Karl Mannheim, though markedly influenced by the Marxist viewpoint, particularly by Lukács, seems to me more adequately characterized by stressing his development from a more exclusively speculative to a more decidedly empirical attitude, which latter is especially evident in his most recent book, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction. Alexander von Schelting's main contribution is his thorough logical analysis of Mannheim's theory in the light of Max Weber's methodology. Ernst Grünwald has given the most complete survey of the forerunners, the history, and the various contributions of the sociology of knowledge. These four thinkers are indirectly dependent on the historically determined emphasis of the movement on ideology in that they remain on the level of a theoretical discussion without arriving at factual research. (shrink)

Recently, many historians of science have chosen to present their historical narratives from the ‘actors’-eye view’. Scientific knowledge not available within the actors’ culture is not permitted to do explanatory work. Proponents of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge purport to ground this historiography on epistemological relativism. I argue that they are making an unnecessary mistake: unnecessary because the historiographical genre in question can be defended on aesthetic and didactic grounds; and a mistake because the argument from relativism is in (...) any case incoherent.The argument of the present article is self-contained, but steers clear of metaphysical debates in the philosophy of science. To allay fears of hidden assumptions, the sequel, to be published in the following issue, will consider SSK’s prospects of succour from scientific realism, instrumentalism, and a metaphysical system of Bruno Latour’s own devising. (shrink)

This article focuses on two developments in nineteenth-century (philosophy of) social science: Moritz Lazarus’s and Heymann Steinthal’s Völkerpsychologie and Georg Simmel’s early sociology of knowledge. The article defends the following theses. First, Lazarus and Steinthal wavered between a “strong” and a “weak” program for Völkerpsychologie. Ingredients for the strong program included methodological neutrality and symmetry; causal explanation of beliefs based on causal laws; a focus on groups, interests, tradition, culture, or materiality; determinism; and a self-referential model of social institutions. (...) Second, elements of the weak program were the blurring of explanatory and normative interests, an emphasis on freedom of the will, and antirelativism and antimaterialism. Third, later research projects keeping the label “Völkerpsychologie” followed the weak program. Fourth, in the 1880s and 1890s, Simmel tried to build on some of the elements of the strong program. Finally, and fifth, part of the explanation for why Simmel did not succeed in his attempt had to do with the social-political situation of German academia around 1900. (shrink)

Historians of science have frequently sought to exclude modern scientific knowledge from their narratives. Part I of this paper, published in the previous issue, cautioned against seeing more than a literary preference at work here. In particular, it was argued—contra advocates of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge —that a commitment to epistemological relativism should not be seen as having straightforward historiographical consequences. Part II considers further SSK-inspired attempts to entangle the currently fashionable historiography with particular positions in the philosophy (...) of science. None, I argue, is promising. David Bloor’s proposed alliance with scientific realism relies upon a mistaken view of contrastive explanation; Andrew Pickering’s appeal to instrumentalism is persuasive for particle physics but much less so for science as a whole; and Bruno Latour’s home-grown metaphysics is so bizarre that its compatibility with SSK is, if anything, a further blow to the latter’s plausibility. (shrink)

The article examines Randall Collins's magnum opus, The Sociology of Philosphies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change in relation to a number of discourses bearing on the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of philosophies, from Hegel and 19th-century historicism to Mannheim, Foucault, Bourdieu and Gillian Rose's Hegel Contra Sociology. The article explicates Collins's dual theory of intellectual networks and institutional conflict as factors in the explanation of intellectual change. The article interprets Collins's work as a (...) classic application of Durkheimian sociological principles to the analysis of knowledge. However, the article argues that Collins is less successful in accounting for the internal normative motives of inquiry and the problem of what Hegel saw as the claims of reason in history based on the orientation to truth. (shrink)

Through network diagrams and sustained narrative, sociologist Randall Collins traces the development of philosophical thought from ancient Greece to modern ...

This paper considers the charge that—contrary to the current widespread assumption accompanying the near-universal neglect of his work—Wilhelm Jerusalem (1854–1923) cannot count as one of the founders of the sociology of (scientific) knowledge. In order to elucidate the matter, Jerusalem’s “sociology of cognition” is here reconstructed in the context of his own work in psychology and philosophy as well as in the context of the work of some predecessors and contemporaries. It is argued that while it shows clear (...) discontinuities with the present-day understanding of the sociology of (scientific) knowledge, Jerusalem’s sociology of cognition was not only distinctive in its own day but also anticipated in nuce a much-discussed theme in current history of science. (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] book engages with the established scholarly tradition in sociology related to the study of Islam. Such engagement is required to clear the ground to make possible access to the lived reality of Islam in the contemporary world. A large part of the book is author’s conversation with the tradition of scholarship around the study of (...) Islam in its global and local context. This conversation consists of critical appraisals, methodological questions and useful distinctions that must inform a sociological venture into examining the ‘Islamic ecumene’ in the context of history and present frames of globalism.The author admits that the field is continuously challenged in the global public sphere on account of the politicization of Islam-related themes. The author identifies the relations of religion... (shrink)

Much of Arnold Hauser’s work on the social history of art and the philosophy of art history is informed by a concern for the cognitive dimension of art. The present paper offers a reconstruction of this aspect of Hauser’s project and identifies areas of overlap with the sociology of knowledge—where the latter is to be understood as both a separate discipline and a going intellectual concern. Following a discussion of Hauser’s personal and intellectual background, as well as (...) of the shifting political and academic setting of his work, the paper addresses one of Hauser’s central questions, viz. how best to square a thoroughgoing commitment to the social nature of art with the reality of successive artistic styles, given that the latter seem to be characterizable on purely formal grounds. This is followed by a discussion of Hauser’s conflicted views on the relation between art, science, and technology. This injects a tension into Hauser’s work, due to his initial reluctance to explain just how the aesthetic and the cognitive realms relate. The final part of the paper, through a closer examination of the analogies and disanalogies that Hauser sees between art history and the history of science, attempts to give a positive answer—“on Hauser’s behalf”, as it were—to the question of whether art may be credited with a specific cognitive dimension of its own, and if so, what its contribution to our cognitive enterprise may consist in. (shrink)

2015 Reprint of Original 1936 American Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Karl Mannheim was a Hungarian-born sociologist, influential in the first half of the 20th century and one of the founding fathers of classical sociology as well as a founder of the sociology of knowledge. His essays on the sociology of knowledge have become classics in the field. In "Ideology and Utopia" he argued that the application of the term (...) ideology ought to be broadened. He traced the history of the term from what he called a "particular" view. This view originally saw ideology as the perhaps deliberate obscuring of facts. Over time this view gave way to a "total" conception (most notably in Marx), which argued that a whole social group's thought was formed by its social position (e.g. the proletariat's beliefs were conditioned by their relationship to the means of production). However, he called for a further step, which he called a general total conception of ideology, in which it was recognized that everyone's beliefs-including the social scientist's-were a product of the context they were created in. Mannheim points out social class, location and generation as the greatest determinants of knowledge. He feared this could lead to relativism but proposed the idea of relationism as an antidote. To uphold the distinction, he maintained that the recognition of different perspectives according to differences in time and social location appears arbitrary only to an abstract and disembodied theory of knowledge. (shrink)

Value dimensions of mature theory change in science are considered. It is argued that the interaction of the values of the cross-theories constitutes the major mechanism of theory change in this dimension. Examples from history of science describing the details of the mechanism are given.

The relationship between archaeology and other sciences has only recently become a research topic for sociologists and historians of science. From the 1950s to the present day, different approaches have been taken and the aims of research studies have changed considerably. Besides methodological textbooks, which aim at advancing archaeological knowledge, historians of archaeology have tackled this question by exploring the development of archaeology as a scientific discipline. More recently, collaborations between archaeologists and other scientists have been examined as a general (...) phenomenon regarding transfers of knowledge and power relationships between specialists, organizations, and scientific tools, where archaeology is considered as a scientific practice. Adopting a sociohistorical perspective, this entry examines the specificity of aims, facts, and procedures shared by archaeologists and other scientists regarding the crucial question of measuring time and computations. (shrink)

The book is divided into 3 parts. The first argues that activities which appear to be timeless - gathering knowledge, analysing, disseminating and employing it - are in fact time-bound and take different forms in different periods and places. The second part tries to counter the tendency to write a triumphalist history of the 'growth' of knowledge by discussing losses of knowledge and the price of specialization. The third part offers geographical, sociological and chronological overviews, contrasting the experience of (...) centres and peripheries and arguing that each of the main trends of the period - professionalization, secularization, nationalization, democratization, etc, coexisted and interacted with its opposite."--Publisher. (shrink)

Advocates of the strong programme in the sociology of knowledge contend that its four defining tenets entail the elimination and replacement tout court of epistemology by strong sociology of knowledge. I advance a naturalistic conception of both substantive and meta-level epistemological inquiry which fully complies with these four tenets and thereby shows that the strong programme neither entails nor even augurs the demise of epistemology.

This chapter explores the background ideas are deeply rooted in the history of philosophy, and interact with it in complex ways. It discusses the elements out of which later sociology of knowledge was constructed. The classical sociology of knowledge is an attempt to construct a neutral account of ideology and related concepts. The prime example of an organic period was the medieval period, in which religion, political ideology, and forms of the division of labor and authority fit (...) together as a whole and in which the intellectual aspects of social life justified and explained the social order, which was a productive order and division of labor. K. Mannheim uses the term ideology in a specific way, unlike its later use, and uses the term “utopia” for what would normally be called ideology. Mannheim distinguishes utopia and ideology by saying that ideologies are concrete: in fact they are a lot like practices, or habitus. (shrink)

It is widely believed that the “strong programme” in the sociology of knowledge comes into serious conflict with mainstream epistemology. I argue that the programme has two aspects—one modest, and the other less so. The programme’s modest aspect—best represented by the “symmetry thesis”—does not contain anything to threaten much of the epistemological mainstream, but does come into conflict with a certain kind of epistemological “externalism”. The immodest aspect, however—in the form of “finitism”—pushes the programme towards a radical form of (...) relativism about truth. Accepting these points will allow us to put an end to much unnecessary debate surrounding the strong programme, and allow a more fruitful discussion to begin.Author Keywords: Author Keywords: Strong programme; Epistemology; Normativity; Relativism; Finitism. (shrink)

REVIEW (1): "Jeff Kochan’s book offers both an original reading of Martin Heidegger’s early writings on science and a powerful defense of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) research program. Science as Social Existence weaves together a compelling argument for the thesis that SSK and Heidegger’s existential phenomenology should be thought of as mutually supporting research programs." (Julian Kiverstein, in Isis) ---- REVIEW (2): "I cannot in the space of this review do justice to the richness and range of (...) Kochan's discussion [...]. There is a great deal in this foundational portion of Kochan's discussion that I find tremendously interesting and engaging [...]." (David R. Cerbone, in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science) ---- REVIEW (3): "Science as Social Existence will be of interest not only to Heidegger scholars but to anyone engaged in science and technology studies. [...] This is an informative and original book. Kochan should be praised for his clear, pleasant-to-read prose." (Michael Butler, in CHOICE). (shrink)

In the structural architectonics of religious studies one of the important places is the sociology of religion. Being in close intercourse with philosophy, history, psychology, phenomenology of religion, culturology and ethics, it also appears as a specific branch of socio-scientific knowledge.

Knowledges and their histories -- Concepts -- Processes -- Problems and prospects -- Timeline.

Threatened Knowledge discusses the practices of knowing, not-knowing, and not wanting to know from the middle ages to the twentieth century. By bringing together cultural historians of the histories of knowledge, emotions, finance, and global intellectual history, Threatened Knowledge is a useful tool for all students and scholars of the history of knowledge and science on a global scale.

James Maffie claims that weak continuity reliabilism is compatible with the principles, as well as the insights, of the Strong Programme in the Sociology of Knowledge (SPSK). There are three possible readings of weak continuity reliabilism: I argue that the first two are unsound, while the third is actually inconsistent with the principles of SPSK. SPSK is instead compatible with an identicist epistemology, one that does not aim to distinguish scientific epistemology from our everyday epistemic practice.

Sociology of religion in the West is a field of knowledge with at least 100 years of history. As a science and as a discipline, the sociology of religion has been developing in most Western universities since the late nineteenth century, having established traditions, forming well-known schools, areas related to the names of famous scholars. The total number of researchers of religion abroad has never been counted, but there are more than a thousand different centers, universities, colleges (...) where religion is taught and studied. If we assume that each of them has an average of 10 religious scholars, theologians, then the army of scholars of religion is amazing. Most of them are united in representative associations of researchers of religion, which have a clear sociological color. Among them are the most famous International Society for the Sociology of Religion and the Society for Scientific Study of Religion. (shrink)

This collection is the first proceedings volume of the lectures delivered within the framework of the Israel Colloquium for the History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science, in its year of inauguration 1981-82. It thus marks the beginning of a new venture. Rather than attempting to express an ideology of the l}nity of science, this collection in fact aims at presenting a kaleidoscopic picture of the variety of views about science and within science. Three main disciplines come together in (...) this volume. The first of scientists, the second of historians and sociologists of science, the third of philosophers interested in science. The scientists try to present the scientific body of knowledge in areas where the scientific adventure kindles the imagination of the culture of our time. At the same of course, they register their own reflections on the nature of this body time, of knowledge and on its likely course of future development. For the historians and sociologists, in contrast, science is there to be studied diachronically, as a process, on the one hand, and synchronically, as a social institution, on the other. As for the phil9sophers, finally, their contribution to this series is not meant to remain within the confines of what is usually seen as the philosophy of science proper, or to be limited to the analysis of the scientific mode of reasoning and thinking: it is allowed, indeed encouraged, to encompass alter native, and on occasion even competing, modes of thought. (shrink)

I compare recent work in the sociology of scientific knowledge with other types of sociological research. On this basis I urge a revival of the sociology of science, offer a tentative agenda, and attempt to show how the questions I raise might be addressed.

Knowledge is inextricably bound to power in the context of settler colonialism where apprehension of the Other is a tool of domination. Tracing the development of the “settler colonial” paradigm, this article deconstructs Zionist and Israeli dispossession of Palestinian land and sovereignty, applying the sociology of knowledge production to the study of the Israeli-Palestinian case. The settler colonial paradigm, linked to Israeli critical sociology, post-Zionism, and postcolonialism, reemerged following changes in the political landscape from the mid-1990s that reframed (...) the history of the Nakba as enduring, challenged the Jewish definition of the state, and legitimated Palestinians as agents of history. Palestinian scholars in Israel lead the paradigm’s reformulation. This article offers a phenomenology of Palestinian positionality, a critical potential for decolonizing the settler colonial structure and exclusive Jewish sovereignty, to consolidate a field of study that shapes not only research into the Israeli-Palestinian case but approaches to decolonization and liberation. (shrink)

In the sociology of science and sociology of scientific knowledge, the decline of functionalism during the 1970s opened the field to a wide range of theoretical possibilities. However, a Marxist-influenced alternative to functionalism, interests analysis, quickly disappeared, and feminist-multicultural frameworks failed to achieved a dominant position in the field. Instead, functionalism was replaced by a variety of agency-based frameworks that focused on constructive or performative processes. The shift in the sociology of science from Mertonian functionalism to the (...) poststrong program, agency-based sociology of scientific knowledge has parallels with the broader shift in political ideologies from social liberalism to neoliberalism. The argument is made in a way that is cognizant of the criticisms raised against interests analysis and avoids the ?short circuit? of class imputation. Instead, the approach defends the potential for a more integrated approach to the structure-agency-meaning triangle in STS via the use of field sociology. (shrink)

The article, based on a retrospective excursion into the history of Ukrainian religious studies, reveals the peculiarities of the formation of the sociology of religion in Ukraine. The author shows its theoretical and empirical sociological and religious basis. In particular, in this context, the importance of scientific achievements of Western European scholars (O. Comte, E. Durkheim, G. Spencer, M. Weber, etc.) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is emphasized. It is established that the key role in the formation (...) of the sociology of religion in Ukraine, precisely as an interdisciplinary (religious and sociological) branch of scientific knowledge, was played by Ukrainian scientists (academic religious scholars) and the Department of Religious Studies of the H.S. Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. The example of cooperation between religious scholars, teachers and students (who gained experience as a practicing sociologist-religious scholar) shows the understanding of religion as a social phenomenon in the triad “Student – Teacher – Scholar”. It is determined that a significant place in the process of formation of the sociology of religion in Ukraine was occupied by the Specialized Academic Council D 26.161.03 for the defense of dissertations for the degree of Doctor (Candidate) of Sciences in the speciality 09.00.11 – Religious Studies (in the field of philosophical, historical and sociological sciences). It is proved that thanks to the contribution of Ukrainian academic religious scholars, the sociology of religion has established itself in the scientific academic space of Ukraine. (shrink)

This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of the various sociologies of New Zealand from the late 19th century to the present day. Opening with previously undocumented insights into the history of proto-sociology in New Zealand, the book then explores the parallel stories of the discipline both as a mainstream subject in Sociology departments and as a more diffuse ‘sociology’ within other university units.The rise and fall of departments, specialties and research networks is plotted and the (...) ways in which external and internal factors have shaped these is explained. Different generations of sociologists, including many immigrants, are each shown to have left their unique mark on New Zealand sociology. The author demonstrates that the rising interest in topics specific to New Zealand has been accompanied by increasing capacities to contribute to world sociology. This book will have inter-disciplinary appeal across the social sciences and provides a valuable study of the development of sociology in a semi-peripheral country. (shrink)

Mother-blame, the propensity to explain negative outcomes for children by focusing on the failures of mothers, has a long history in the social-scientific study of adolescent deviance. We examine trends in mother-blaming over time by performing a textual analysis of scholarly accounts of the etiology of anorexia nervosa. Our reading of these expert accounts suggests that mother-blaming for child pathology is interconnected with changing ideas about proper social roles for women. Deficient mothering, that is, was often linked to a (...) woman's ambitiousness, willingness to abandon familial duties in favor of careers, or, conversely, her embracement of patriarchal proscriptions for what a woman should be. Poor maternal parenting was a consistent and dominant theme through much of the period we analyzed, however, the structural and cultural explanations appeared to change substance and form in synchrony with prevailing ideas about a woman's rightful relationship to the paid labor market. Other social explanations for changing rhetoric, including the gender composition of published accounts, are also explored. (shrink)