Sociology of knowledge

The sociology of knowledge is the study of the social origins of ideas, and of the effects prevailing ideas have on societies. (Compare history of ideas.)

Schools

Karl Mannheim

The German political philosophers Karl Marx (1818?1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820?1895) argued in Die Deutsche Ideologie (1846, German Ideology) and elsewhere that people's ideologies, including their social and political beliefs and opinions, are rooted in their class interests, and more generally in the social and economic circumstances in which they live: "It is men, who in developing their material inter-course, change, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life" (Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe 1/5).

Related Topics:
Karl Marx - Friedrich Engels - Ideologies - Class

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Under the influence of this doctrine, and of Phenomenology, the Hungarian-born German sociologist Karl Mannheim (1893?1947) gave impetus to the growth of the sociology of knowledge with his Ideologie und Utopie (1929, translated and extended in 1936 as Ideology and Utopia), although the term had been introduced five years earlier by the co-founder of the movement, the German philosopher and social theorist Max Scheler (1874?1928), in Versuche zu einer Soziologie des Wissens (1924, Attempts at a Sociology of Knowledge). A strong interpretation claims that all knowledge and beliefs are the products of socio-political forces, but this version is self-defeating, because if it is true, then it too is merely a product of socio-political forces and has no claim to truth and no persuasive force. Mannheim sought to escape this paradox by exempting free-floating intellectuals, whom he claimed were only loosely anchored in social traditions, relatively detached from the class system, and capable of avoiding the pitfalls of total ideologies and of forging a "dynamic synthesis" of the ideologies of other groups.

Related Topics:
Phenomenology - Karl Mannheim - Max Scheler

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See also: epistemology, sociology.

Related Topics:
Epistemology - Sociology

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Phenomenological sociology

Based on the work of Edmund Husserl's philosophical phenomenology, Albert Schutz proposed a micro-sociological approach also known as phenomenology. Schutz looked at the way in which ordinary members of society consitute and reconstitute the world in which they live; life world.

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For Schutz, it was important to bracket ones taken-for-granted assumptions about the life in order to properly understand the life world of those being researched.

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See: Holstein, J. A., & Gubrium, J. F. (1994). Phenomoenology, ethnomethodology, and interpretive practice. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The handbook of qualitative research (1st ed., pp. 262-272). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

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Michel Foucault

A particularly important strain of the sociology of knowledge is the criticism by Michel Foucault. In ', 1961, he argued that conceptions of madness and what was considered "reason" or "knowledge" was itself subject to major culture bias - in this respect mirroring similar criticisms by Thomas Szasz, at the time the foremost critic of psychiatry, and himself now an eminent psychiatrist. A point where Foucault and Szasz agreed was that sociological processes played the major role in defining "madness" as an "illness" and prescribing "cures".

Related Topics:
Michel Foucault - 1961 - Culture bias - Thomas Szasz - Psychiatry

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In ', 1963, Foucault extended his critique to all of modern scientific medicine, arguing for the central conceptual metaphor of "The Gaze", which had implications for medical education, prison design, and the carceral state as understood today. Concepts of criminal justice and its intersection with medicine were better developed in this work than in Szasz and others, who confined their critique to current psychiatric practice.

Related Topics:
1963 - Scientific medicine - Conceptual metaphor - The Gaze - Medical education - Prison design - Carceral state - Criminal justice

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Finally, in ', 1966, and The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1969, Foucault introduced the abstract notions of mathesis and taxonomia. These, he claimed, had transformed 17th and 18th century studies of "general grammar" into modern "linguistics", "natural history" into modern "biology", and "analysis of wealth" into modern "economics". Not, claimed Foucault, without loss of meaning. The 19th century had transformed what knowledge was.

Related Topics:
1966 - The Archaeology of Knowledge - 1969 - Mathesis - Taxonomia - General grammar - Linguistics - Natural history - Biology - Analysis of wealth - Economics

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Perhaps Foucault's best-known and most controversial claim was that before the 18th century, "Man did not exist". The notions of humanity and of humanism were inventions or creations of this 19th century transformation. Accordingly, a cognitive bias had been introduced unwittingly into science, by over-trusting the individual doctor or scientist's ability to see and state things objectively. This study still guides the sociology of knowledge and has been claimed to have sparked single-handedly much of postmodernism.

Related Topics:
Man did not exist - Humanity - Humanism - Cognitive bias - Postmodernism

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Bruno Latour

Bruno Latour is a French sociologist of science best known for his books We Have Never Been Modern, Laboratory Life, and Science in Action, describing the process of scientific research from the perspective of social construction based on field observations of working scientists.

Related Topics:
Bruno Latour - French - Sociologist of science - Social construction

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The sociology of mathematical knowledge

Studies of mathematical practice and quasi-empiricism in mathematics are also rightly part of the sociology of knowledge, since they focus on the community of those who practice mathematics and their common assumptions. Since Eugene Wigner raised the issue in 1960 and Hilary Putnam made it more rigorous in 1975, the question of why fields such as physics and mathematics should agree so well has been in question. Proposed solutions point out that the fundamental constituents of mathematical thought, space, form-structure, and number-proportion are also the fundamental constituents of physics. It is also worthwhile to note that physics is nothing but a modeling of reality, and seeing causal relationships governing repeatable observed phenomena, and much of mathematics has been developed precisely for the goal of developing these models in a rigorous fashion. Another approach is to suggest that there is no deep problem, that the division of human scientific thinking through using words such as 'mathematics' and 'physics' is only useful in their practical everyday function to categorify and distinguish.

Related Topics:
Mathematical practice - Quasi-empiricism in mathematics - Mathematics - Eugene Wigner - 1960 - Hilary Putnam - 1975 - Physics

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Fundamental contributions to the sociology of mathematical knowledge have been made by Sal Restivo and David Bloor. Restivo draws upon the work of scholars such as Oswald Spengler (The Decline of the West, 1926), Raymond L. Wilder and Lesley A. White, as well as contemporary sociologists of knowledge and science studies scholars. David Bloor draws upon Ludwig Wittgenstein and other contemporary thinkers. They both claim that mathematical knowledge is socially constructed and has irreducible contingent and historical factors woven into it. More recently Paul Ernest has proposed a social constructivist account of mathematical knowledge, drawing on the works of both of these sociologists.

Related Topics:
Sal Restivo - David Bloor - Ludwig Wittgenstein - Paul Ernest

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An interesting artifact in the sociology of knowledge is the Erdős number (the length of the smallest path in the network of all mathematicians to Paul Erdős).

Related Topics:
Erdős number - Paul Erdős

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