It is virtually impossible to separate science as a system of knowledge from its institutional component i.e. people who have vested interests in producing science for a living. As with every other professional commodity, the production of socially acceptable knowledge is done by a relatively narrow group of insiders who use various schemes to monopolize the production process and exclude lay persons to limit competition. Aside formal requirements, such as academic credentials, and the esoteric language that is not easily understood by outsiders, there is a host of semi-formal and informal obstacles to bar the non-initiated from the business of producing scientific knowledge. These may include access to instituional resources, guarded by semi-formal thought police (journal editors, department chairpersons, professional associations, informal consortia, schools of thought with its guardians of orthodoxy, etc.), as well as informal rules of acceptable discourse.
As I understand, and I am ceratin that those who happen be economists on this list will confirm that, economists -- especially of the neoclassical varierty -- are particularly efficient at thought-policing their discipline and purging it from any form of discourse that may potentially undermine the insider control of producing what passess for legitimate economic knowledge.
By contrast, sociologists are very bad at thought-policing their discipline. As a result, we have not only the proliferation of various forms of sociological discourse, and thus a wide variety of intellectual products -- which is not necessarily a bad thing -- but also a number of quacks - from political advocates, to moral entrepreneurs, to journalists, and to fiction writers -- who not only claim to produce sociological knowledge, but are also formally a part of the institutional apparatus of the sociological knowledge production (the academe, institutes for these or those studies, think tanks, etc.).
Furthermore, the production of social science does not require much physical capital (such as labs, expensive machinery, etc.) -- the minimum requirement is paper and pencil, access to a library and sufficient free time, but personal computer is the standard. On the top of it, sociological jargon is of relatively low density (as compared to, say, economics), and that makes it easy to interpret -- and misinterpret - by laymen and quacks (clergy, talk show hosts, moral entrepreneurs etc.).
So the relative absence of thought-policing, low capital requirements, and the low density of the scientific jargon make it rather easy for everyone to produce social 'science.' And, of course, the incentives to do so are great, because nominally scientific discourse carries much more political and intellectual clout than, say, high brow journalism, advocacy, or literary fiction.
But once you let all that riff raff into the room, there is no way you can falsify or prove anything, because those unfamiliar or unwilling to pursue the discourse of empirical falsification would insist that their opinions are as good as any other. This is democracy at its worst - as Aristotle correctly observed.
Of course, those who do literary discourse use emprical material in a much different way than those the scientific discourse -- as illustration rather than the counterfactual -- and those two groups simply talk past each other. Again, I am not trying to discredit subjective discourse, fiction writing, etc. or their potential heuristic value for science -- -- all I am saying is that these are two totally different types of dicourse, and they should be kept separate to avoid confusion.
So from the institutional point of view, you are correct, any agreement in social science, especially sociology is impossible. But that, of course, does not mean that you cannot emprically falsify propositions formulated in the right for that task way.
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>Why not call it 'white male working-class solidarity,' then? That would be
>much more specific, concrete, and accurate, and it has an added benefit of
>preserving the term 'working-class solidarity' for a normative use.
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Good point.
Regards,
Wojtek Sokolowski