> The logical distinction which is said to exist between facts and
> values
>is founded on the belief that it is possible to conceive of one without
>the other. Given a particular fact, the argument runs, one may without
>contradiction attach any value to it. The fact itself does not entail a
>specific value. Historically the view that moral beliefs are contingent
>has tended to go along with the view that they are also arbitrary. On
>this model, all judgment depends in the last instance on the independent
>set of values which each individual, for reasons best known to himself,
>brings to the situation. The ethical premiss is not only a final
>arbiter but a mysterious one, defying sociological and even
>psychological analysis. Though some recent defenders of orthodoxy have
>sought to muddle the distinction between fact and value with talk of
>its "context," "function," "real reference," "predisposition," etc.,
>the logical line drawn in conception remains. Yet, if one cannot
>conceive of anything one chooses to call a fact (because it is an open
>ended relation) without bringing in evaluative elements (and vice
>versa), the very problem Orthodox thinkers have set out to answer cannot
>be posed.
see the GAK pomo/poststructuralist Steven Seidman!!!! woohoo Carrol Marx was a poststructuralist!::
<Yoshoid asterisks> ******* </Yoshoid asterisks> <Yoshoid massive quotage> A poststructuralist anti-essentialism rejects the modernist authorization of sociology which assumes that it is possible to obtain knowledge of society through some sort of reflective correspondence to a unitary social reality. The poststructuralist challenge demands that sociology comes to terms with the fundamental opacity of a sociological knowledge of society. The possibility of sociological knowledge requires opacity and that opacity is the text; the text is the foil--the silvering for the looking glass--that allows for the very project of sociology.
This disruption of the correspondence relation between sociology and society reveals how sociology is coextensive with its object and, therefore, any investigation of society is simultaneously an interrogation of sociology. One must acknowledge, of course, that others have recognized that sociology is implicated in the very society it studies. Yet, earlier theorists have generally tried to locate an Archimedian point from which sociological analysis might proceed: the proletariat, free-floating intellectuals, the feminist standpoint. A poststructuralist stance rejects any such appeal to a self-grounding foundation or an extra-discursive reality which authorizes (founds and funds) the discipline.
As both Douglas Kellner and Charles Lemert imply, a poststructuralist sociology would eschew the possibility (and desirability) of grounding sociological inquiry in any metatheoretical discourse which presumes to delimit epistemological and ontological boundaries. Sociology would, instead, recognize that sociological analysis can only proceed discursively, textually. Sociology would, as it always has, proceed through the analysis of texts. Yet, textual analysis can no longer be understood as the simple representation of an extra-discursive reality; social reality is no longer the context of the text. Instead, sociology would be understood as the practice of writing about/of/in the dynamic of an intertextual social field. The social, in other words, is written and sociology is writing.
This claim, of course, rests uneasily with modernist conceptions of sociology in which theoretical adequacy is measured in terms of a correspondence to empirical evidence--whether generated through analytic-inductive or hypothetical-deductive models of research. Modernist sociology is only 'allowed' to ask why particular events occurs as they do and, even when sociologists are explicitly concerned with meaning (as in the interpretive approach), they generally ask what an event or practice means. However, once the social is conceived as a textual production another question may be asked: "How does the social text mean?" The poststructuralist stance allows for and demands that such a question be asked because it conceives of sociology as a discursive practice in which social reality is produced.
A poststructuralist sociology would dissolve the hierarchical opposition between social reality and representation, between fact and value. The modernist claim to sociological truth rests on the privileging of the first term in each of these binary oppositions. However, poststructuralism deconstructs these, not by eliminating both or reducing one to the other, but by revealing the fundamental inseparability of the two terms. A modernist essentializing sociological truth has been achieved by constructing a transcendental, unitary, self-identity which represses representation and value in the name of reality and fact. The poststucturalist response, of course, has been to subvert these dualisms, to reveal the repression involved in constructing theoretical truth. Hence, poststructuralists engage in the practice of deconstruction: disruption, displacement, reinscription. That is, they disrupt the binarism, displace the privileged term and reinscribe the relationship by privileging the formerly repressed term. The practice of reinscription, then, informs the postmodernist focus on difference, otherness, writing, the feminine, the irrational--all considered repressed terms in Western philosophical discourse.
Critics of poststructuralism frequently reject the attempt to import into sociology the basic semiotic claim that society/culture/the social is written and that there is no extra-discursive social reality in which sociological theory can locate a stable referent. Such a position, critics argue, offers nothing more than an impotent and illusory subjective idealism. The claim that 'all the world is a text' and that we can never get outside of the text is open to Jonathan Turner's complaint regarding phenomenological solipsism: Such speculations about the character of human knowledge are incapable of locating the causally "operative dynamics" of society and instead they lead sociologists directly to a corner to contemplate their navels."
The poststructuralist challenge can be understood as an effort at intellectual critique and revitalization. As such, it follows in a long tradition of attempts to reconstruct the sociological enterprise. Each major school of thought has developed as an attempt to revitalize sociology: the Parsonian synthesis of the classicists, the development of conflict theory and the critique of functionalism, critical theory, feminist sociology, exchange theory, neo-marxism.... Yet, as Lemert notes,"no school of post-structuralist thought has developed in sociology." <...> It would be impossible, I believe, to entirely import poststructuralist thought into the discipline. Still, the poststructuralist challenge may play some role in revitalizing the discipline. The insistence that the social world is nothing more than discourse rests uneasily with sociologists concerned with locating causal relationships which determine the contours of society. And, even those sociologists more concerned with meaning (rather than causes) would find Richard Harvey Brown's conception of sociological truths not a little unsettling. Brown undermines any attempt (whether positivist or interpretivist) to claim that a theoretical stance or methodology has a more adequate access to social reality. All schools of thought rhetorically construct sociological truths. Thus, he calls for a radical pluralism in which no theory or methodology has privilege. An extra-discursive social reality cannot be denied to exist, but it cannot be isomorphically grasped; thus, we cannot appeal to an extra-discursive social reality as the final arbiter of disciplinary disputes.
Brown's epistemological pluralism is strikingly similar to that developed in American pragmatist philosophy. And, I would argue that Brown's work can best be understood by drawing on the work of John Dewey in his metaphysical treatise, Experience and Nature. Here, Dewey argued that science was the search for truth and the meaning that truth has for us. There is an objective social and natural world which exhibits law-like regularities. However, the knowledge that we acquire of the world alters the meaning it has for us. That is, it alters our activities--the uses to which we put that knowledge. Knowledge is a means to action in the world; a re-leasing of the potentialities of the world. <...> </Yoshoid massive quotage> <Yoshoid asterisks> ******** </Yoshoid asterisks>