Sociology of knowledge
1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias The sociology of knowledge is the study of the relationship between human thought, the social context within which it arises, and the effects that prevailing ideas have on societies.
Instead, it deals with broad fundamental questions about the extent and limits of social influences on individuals' lives and the social-cultural basis of our knowledge about the world.
However, it was reinvented and applied closely to everyday life in the 1960s, particularly by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality (1966).
Peter Hamilton argues that the thinkers of the Enlightenment produced a sociology of ideas and values when they turned their attention to the scientific analysis of society.
Hamilton argues that these thinkers were committed to progress and the freedom of the individual to determine his own beliefs and values, which are at odds with traditional moral considerations in theology.
The empirical method of cross-cultural comparison became a methodology for understanding society rather than the idea of revealed truth inherent in sociology, leading to a measure of cultural relativism.
[7] Hamilton argues that the Enlightenment can be seen as a critical response to the Christian theology used by the Jacobins, which manipulated people's understanding of truth to maintain a feudal order.
Primarily focused on historical methodology, Vico asserts that it is necessary to move beyond a chronicle of events to study a society's history.
This "civil world", made up of actions, thoughts, ideas, myths, norms, religious beliefs, and institutions, is the product of the human mind.
[7] While permeated by his penchant for etymology, Vico's ideas and a theory of cyclical history (corsi e ricorsi), are significant for the underlying premise about our understanding and knowledge of social structure.
[9] Durkheim sought to combine elements of rationalism and empiricism, arguing that certain aspects of logical thought common to all humans did exist, but that they were products of collective life (thus contradicting the tabula rasa empiricist understanding whereby categories are acquired by individual experience alone), and that they were not universal a priori truths (as Kant argued) since the content of the categories differed from society to society.
They can include words, slogans, ideas, or any number of material items that can serve as a symbol, such as a cross, a rock, a temple, a feather, etc.
As Durkheim says, représentations collectives, and language in particular:"Add to that which we can learn by our own personal experience all that wisdom and science which the group has accumulated in the course of centuries.
"[12]As such, language, as a social product, literally structures and shapes our experience of reality, an idea developed by later French philosophers, such as Michel Foucault.
The German political philosophers Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) argued in Die deutsche Ideologie (1846, The German Ideology) and elsewhere that people's ideologies, including their social and political beliefs and opinions, are rooted in their class interests and more broadly in the social and economic circumstances in which they live: 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, phenomenologist and social theorist Max Scheler (1874–1928), in Versuche zu einer Soziologie des Wissens (1924, Attempts at a Sociology of Knowledge).
Mannheim felt that a stratum of free-floating intellectuals (who he claimed were only loosely anchored to the class structure of society) could most perfectly realize this form of truth by creating a "dynamic synthesis" of the ideologies of other groups.
[13] Phenomenological sociology is the study of the formal structures of concrete social existence as made available in and through the analytical description of acts of intentional consciousness.
Alternatively, if the facticity of the social world and the structures of consciousness prove to be culturally and historically relative, then we are at an impasse in regard to any meaningful scientific understanding of the social world that is not subjective (as opposed to being objective and grounded in nature [positivism], or inter-subjective and grounded in the structures of consciousness [phenomenology]), and relative to the cultural and idealization formations of particular concrete individuals living in a particular socio-historical group.
Foucault and Szasz agreed that sociological processes played a major role in defining "madness" as an "illness" and in prescribing "cures".
Concepts of criminal justice and its intersection with medicine were better developed in this work than in the contributions of Szasz and others, who confined their critique to current psychiatric practice.
Foucault's The Order of Things (1966) and The Archeology of Knowledge (1969) introduced abstract notions of mathesis and taxonomia to explain the subjective 'ordering' of the human sciences.
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.
It also integrates insights from sociology (including Durkheim, Marx, Weber and Foucault), systemic functional linguistics, philosophy (such as Karl Popper and critical realism), early cultural studies, anthropology (especially Mary Douglas and Ernest Gellner), and other approaches.
[29] It was first developed by Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell in her book Southern Theory, with colleagues[citation needed] at the University of Sydney and elsewhere.
