[lbo-talk] Digestimundo vavavoom

snitsnat snitilicious at tampabay.rr.com
Sat Jun 4 21:25:46 PDT 2005


At 12:08 AM 6/5/2005, Carl Remick wrote:
>>From: snitsnat <snitilicious at tampabay.rr.com>
>>
>>... I think it's funny when social scientists make claims about the
>>'base' habits of the majority of the population and then claim to have
>>somehow escaped those baser desires themselves ...
>
>That's exactly what makes my skin crawl about the social "sciences," in
>whose company I spent many unhappy moments in college. I think using the
>model of science for studying humanity has had a pernicious effect on
>people's understanding of themselves and others. This notion of being a
>"social scientist" is just a distancing mechanism to put the observer in a
>detached -- and elevated -- position respective to other individuals. Is
>there any wonder there is no little capacity for empathy left in this
>society when this demented POV infects so much of daily living?
>
>Carl

awww. shoulda taken it 20 years later. then you could take entire navel gazing courses on just that problem! It's not really a new concern though. Alvin Gouldner wrote about it in _The Crisis of Western Sociology_ and I'm certain that others wrote about it before him. Just no time to go to the files to see:

"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"

"Finish your beer. There are sober kids in India."

-- rwmartin



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