Seventy Percent

Kelley jimmyjames at softhome.net
Tue Mar 18 09:56:02 PST 2003



>It is only a
>few malcontents like myself and other on this and similar list - who
>read books other than the bible and watched films other than those made
>in Hollywood - that see through thy ploy and feel bad about it.
>
>Wojtek

"sociologists keep two sets of books, one for the study of 'laymen' and another when he thinks about himself....the sociologist believes himself capable of making hundreds of purely rational decisions....he thinks of these as free technical decisions and of himself as acting in autonomous conformity with technical standards, rather than as a creature molded by social structure and culture. if he finds he has gone wrong, he thinks of himself as having made a mistake. a mistake is an outcome produced not by any social necessity, but by a corrigible ignorance, a lack of careful thought....

when this is called to his attention, he will acknowledge that his behavior is influenced by social forces. he will acknowledge...that there is or can be such a thing as a sociology of knowledge or a sociology of sociology....[but this concession is begrudgingly made. it is] not deeply convincing to him. in short, it is not part of the normal way of thinking about his own everyday work." [p 55]

"methodological dualism is based on the myth that social worlds are merely 'mirrored' in the sociologist's work, rather than seeing them as conceptually constituted by the sociologist' commitments...it serves as a powerful inhibitor of awareness, for it paradoxically presupposes that the sociologist may rightfully be changed as a person by everything except the very intellectual work which is at the center of his existence." [496]

From Alvin Gouldner's discussion of Methodological Dualism in "The Crisis of Western Sociology"

funny, i posted this same quote at you



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