Sociology of knowledge
Encyclopedia
The Sociology of knowledge is the study of the relationship between human thought and the social context within which it arises, and of the effects prevailing ideas have on societies. It is not a specialized area of sociology but instead deals with broad fundamental questions about the extent and limits of social influences on individual's lives and the social-cultural basics of our knowledge about the world.
The sociology of knowledge was pioneered primarily by the sociologists Émile Durkheim
and Marcel Mauss
at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Their works deal directly with how conceptual thought, language, and logic could be influenced by the sociological milieu out of which they arise. In Primitive Classification Durkheim and Mauss take a study of “primitive” group mythology to argue that systems of classification are collectively based and that the divisions with these systems are derived from social categories. While neither author specifically coined nor used the term 'sociology of knowledge', their work is an important first contribution to the field.
The specific term 'sociology of knowledge' first came into widespread use in the 1920s, when a number of German-speaking sociologists
, most notably Max Scheler
, and Karl Mannheim
, wrote extensively on it. With the dominance of functionalism through the middle years of the 20th century, the sociology of knowledge tended to remain on the periphery of mainstream sociological thought. It was largely reinvented and applied much more closely to everyday life in the 1960s, particularly by Peter L. Berger
and Thomas Luckmann
in The Social Construction of Reality
(1966) and is still central for methods dealing with qualitative understanding of human society (compare socially constructed reality). The 'genealogical' and 'archaeological' studies of Michel Foucault
are of considerable contemporary influence.
(1858–1917) is credited as having been the first professor to successfully establish the field of sociology, institutionalizing a department of sociology at the Université de Bordeaux in the 1890s. While his works deal with a number of subjects, including suicide, the family, social structures, and social institutions, a large part of his work deals with the sociology of knowledge. In 1902, he published, with Marcel Mauss, De quelques formes primitives de classification, an essay that examines how the various ways in which a society is organized structurally impacts the formation of a society's categories and logical grouping systems.
Building on his early work with Mauss, Durkheim's definitive statement concerning the sociology of knowledge comes in his magnum opus The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. This book has as its goal not only the elucidation of the social origins and function of religion, but also the social origins and impact of society on language and logical thought. In it, Durkheim argues that religious beliefs require people to separate life into categories of the sacred and the profane, and that rites and rituals are necessary to mark the transition between these two spheres. Here, Durkheim outlines how totemism
within an Australian aboriginal religion is an example of how collective representations are enacted through religion. A totem
is a representation of the clan, which embodies all the characteristics of the group and around which rites and rituals take place. It is through these rituals that religion is enacted and reinforced, creating a collective understanding of reality.
One of the most important elements of Durkheim's theory knowledge is his concept of représentations collectives (collective representations), which is outlined in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Représentations collectives are the symbols and images that come to represent the ideas, beliefs, and values elaborated by a collectivity and are not reducible to individual constituents. 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 elaborates, représentations collectives are created through the intense interaction of religious rituals. They are products of collective activity and as such these representations have the particular, and somewhat contradictory, aspect that they exist externally to the individual (since they are created and controlled not by the individual but by society as a whole), and yet simultaneously within each individual of the society (by virtue of that individual's participation within society). Through représentations collectives the group exerts pressure on the individual to conform to society's norms of morality and thought. As such, collective representations help to order and make sense of the world, but they also express, symbolize and interpret social relationships.
(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 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 feared that this interpretation could be seen to claim that all knowledge and beliefs are the products of socio-political forces since this form of relativism
is self-defeating (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 believed that relativism
was a strange mixture of modern and ancient beliefs in that it contained within itself a belief in an absolute truth which was true for all times and places (the ancient view most often associated with Plato
) and condemned other truth claims because they could not achieve this level of objectivity (an idea gleaned from Marx). Mannheim sought to escape this problem with the idea of 'relationism
'. This is the idea that certain things are true only in certain times and places (a view influenced by pragmatism
) however, this does not make them less true. 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.
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. The "object" of such an analysis is the meaningful lived world of everyday life: the "Lebenswelt", or Life-world (Husserl:1889). The task, like that of every other phenomenological investigation, is to describe the formal structures of this object of investigation in subjective terms, as an object-constituted-in-and-for-consciousness (Gurwitsch:1964). That which makes such a description different from the "naive" subjective descriptions of the man in the street, or those of the traditional, positivist social scientist, is the utilization of phenomenological methods.
The leading proponent of Phenomenological Sociology was Alfred Schutz
[1899-1959]. Schutz sought to provide a critical philosophical foundation for Max Weber
's interpretive sociology through the use of phenomenological methods derived from the transcendental phenomenological investigations of Edmund Husserl
[1859-1938]. Husserl's work was directed at establishing the formal structures of intentional consciousness
. Schutz's work was directed at establishing the formal structures of the Life-world (Schutz:1980). Husserl's work was conducted as a transcendental phenomenology of consciousness. Schutz's work was conducted as a mundane phenomenology of the Life-world (Natanson:1974). The difference in their research projects lies at the level of analysis, the objects taken as topics of study, and the type of phenomenological reduction that is employed for the purposes of analysis.
Ultimately, the two projects should be seen as complementary, with the structures of the latter dependent on the structures of the former. That is, valid phenomenological descriptions of the formal structures of the Life-world should be wholly consistent with the descriptions of the formal structures of intentional consciousness. It is from the latter that the former derives its validity and truth value (Sokolowski:2000).
The phenomenological tie-in with the sociology of knowledge stems from two key historical sources for Mannheim
's analysis: [1] Mannheim was dependent on insights derived from Husserl's phenomenological investigations, especially the theory of meaning as found in Husserl's Logical Investigations of 1900/1901 (Husserl:2000), in the formulation of his central methodological work: "On The Interpretation of Weltanschauung" (Mannheim:1993:see fn41 & fn43) - this essay forms the centerpiece for Mannheim's method of historical understanding and is central to his conception of the sociology of knowledge as a research program; and [2] The concept of "Weltanschauung" employed by Mannheim has its origins in the hermeneutic philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey, who relied on Husserl's theory of meaning (above) for his methodological specification of the interpretive act (Mannheim: 1993: see fn38).
It is also noteworthy that Husserl's analysis of the formal structures of consciousness, and Schuetz's analysis of the formal structures of the Life-world are specifically intended to establish the foundations, in consciousness, for the understanding and interpretation of a social world which is subject to cultural and historical change. The phenomenological position is that although the facticity
of the social world may be culturally and historically relative, the formal structures of consciousness, and the processes by which we come to know and understand this facticity
, are not. That is, the understanding of any actual social world is unavoidably dependent on understanding the structures and processes of consciousness that found, and constitute, any possible social world.
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 which 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.
, 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". In The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception (1963), Foucault extended his critique to institutional clinical 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. 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. 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
"; though not, claimed Foucault, without loss of meaning. The 19th century transformed what knowledge was.
Perhaps Foucault's best-known claim was that "Man did not exist" before the 18th century. Foucault regarded notions of humanity and of humanism
as inventions modernity
. 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. Foucault roots this argument in the rediscovery of Kant, though his thought is significantly influenced by Nietzsche - that philosopher declaring the "death of God" in the 19th century, and the anti-humanists proposing the "death of Man" in the 20th.
In Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, Foucault concentrates on the correlation between knowledge
and power. According to him, knowledge is a form of power and can conversely be used against individuals as a form of power. As a result, knowledge is socially constructed in order to maintain the power of the ruling class
. He argues that knowledge forms discourses and discourses form the dominant ideological ways of thinking which govern our lives. For him, social control is maintained in ‘the disciplinary society’, through codes of control over sexuality and the ideas/knowledge perpetuated through social institutions. In other words, discourses and ideologies subject us to authority and turn people into ‘subjected beings’, who are in turn afraid of being punished if they sway from social norms. Foucault believes that institutions overtly regulate and control our lives. Institutions such as schools reinforce the dominant ideological forms of thinking onto the populace and force us into becoming obedient and docile beings. Hence, the dominant ideology that serves the interests of the ruling class, all while appearing as `neutral`, needs to be questioned and must not go unchallenged.
and that aimed at "bridging the gap between the static data repositories of knowledge management and the dynamic, adaptive behavior of natural systems", and in particular relying on the concept of interaction and emergence
.
Knowledge ecology, and its related concept information ecology
has been elaborated by different academics and practitioners such as Thomas H. Davenport
, Bonnie Nardi
, or Swidler.
(1910 – 2003) dedicates a section of Social Theory and Social Structure
(1949; revised and expanded, 1957 and 1968) to the study of the sociology of knowledge in Part III, titled The Sociology of Knowledge and Mass Communications.
The sociology of knowledge was pioneered primarily by the sociologists Émile Durkheim
Émile Durkheim
David Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology.Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain...
and Marcel Mauss
Marcel Mauss
Marcel Mauss was a French sociologist. The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss' academic work traversed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology...
at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Their works deal directly with how conceptual thought, language, and logic could be influenced by the sociological milieu out of which they arise. In Primitive Classification Durkheim and Mauss take a study of “primitive” group mythology to argue that systems of classification are collectively based and that the divisions with these systems are derived from social categories. While neither author specifically coined nor used the term 'sociology of knowledge', their work is an important first contribution to the field.
The specific term 'sociology of knowledge' first came into widespread use in the 1920s, when a number of German-speaking sociologists
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
, most notably Max Scheler
Max Scheler
Max Scheler was a German philosopher known for his work in phenomenology, ethics, and philosophical anthropology...
, and Karl Mannheim
Karl Mannheim
Karl Mannheim , or Károly Mannheim in the original writing of his name, was a Jewish Hungarian-born sociologist, influential in the first half of the 20th century and one of the founding fathers of classical sociology and a founder of the sociology of knowledge.-Life:Mannheim studied in Budapest,...
, wrote extensively on it. With the dominance of functionalism through the middle years of the 20th century, the sociology of knowledge tended to remain on the periphery of mainstream sociological thought. It was largely reinvented and applied much more closely to everyday life in the 1960s, particularly by Peter L. Berger
Peter L. Berger
Peter Ludwig Berger is an Austrian-born American sociologist well known for his work, co-authored with Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge .-Biography:...
and Thomas Luckmann
Thomas Luckmann
Thomas Luckmann is a German sociologist of Slovene origin. His main areas of research are the sociology of communication, Sociology of knowledge, sociology of religion, and the philosophy of science.- Biography :...
in The Social Construction of Reality
The Social Construction of Reality
The Social Construction of Reality is a book about the sociology of knowledge written by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann and published in 1966....
(1966) and is still central for methods dealing with qualitative understanding of human society (compare socially constructed reality). The 'genealogical' and 'archaeological' studies of Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...
are of considerable contemporary influence.
Émile Durkheim
Émile DurkheimÉmile Durkheim
David Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology.Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain...
(1858–1917) is credited as having been the first professor to successfully establish the field of sociology, institutionalizing a department of sociology at the Université de Bordeaux in the 1890s. While his works deal with a number of subjects, including suicide, the family, social structures, and social institutions, a large part of his work deals with the sociology of knowledge. In 1902, he published, with Marcel Mauss, De quelques formes primitives de classification, an essay that examines how the various ways in which a society is organized structurally impacts the formation of a society's categories and logical grouping systems.
Building on his early work with Mauss, Durkheim's definitive statement concerning the sociology of knowledge comes in his magnum opus The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. This book has as its goal not only the elucidation of the social origins and function of religion, but also the social origins and impact of society on language and logical thought. In it, Durkheim argues that religious beliefs require people to separate life into categories of the sacred and the profane, and that rites and rituals are necessary to mark the transition between these two spheres. Here, Durkheim outlines how totemism
Totemism
Totemism is a system of belief in which humans are said to have kinship or a mystical relationship with a spirit-being, such as an animal or plant...
within an Australian aboriginal religion is an example of how collective representations are enacted through religion. A totem
Totem
A totem is a stipulated ancestor of a group of people, such as a family, clan, group, lineage, or tribe.Totems support larger groups than the individual person. In kinship and descent, if the apical ancestor of a clan is nonhuman, it is called a totem...
is a representation of the clan, which embodies all the characteristics of the group and around which rites and rituals take place. It is through these rituals that religion is enacted and reinforced, creating a collective understanding of reality.
One of the most important elements of Durkheim's theory knowledge is his concept of représentations collectives (collective representations), which is outlined in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Représentations collectives are the symbols and images that come to represent the ideas, beliefs, and values elaborated by a collectivity and are not reducible to individual constituents. 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 elaborates, représentations collectives are created through the intense interaction of religious rituals. They are products of collective activity and as such these representations have the particular, and somewhat contradictory, aspect that they exist externally to the individual (since they are created and controlled not by the individual but by society as a whole), and yet simultaneously within each individual of the society (by virtue of that individual's participation within society). Through représentations collectives the group exerts pressure on the individual to conform to society's norms of morality and thought. As such, collective representations help to order and make sense of the world, but they also express, symbolize and interpret social relationships.
Karl Mannheim
The German political philosophers Karl MarxKarl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
(1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels was a German industrialist, social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of Marxist theory, alongside Karl Marx. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research...
(1820–1895) argued in Die Deutsche Ideologie (1846, German Ideology) and elsewhere that people's ideologies
Ideology
An ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to...
, including their social and political beliefs and opinions, are rooted in their class
Social class
Social classes are economic or cultural arrangements of groups in society. Class is an essential object of analysis for sociologists, political scientists, economists, anthropologists and social historians. In the social sciences, social class is often discussed in terms of 'social stratification'...
interests, and more broadly 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).
Under the influence of this doctrine, and of Phenomenology, the Hungarian-born German sociologist Karl Mannheim
Karl Mannheim
Karl Mannheim , or Károly Mannheim in the original writing of his name, was a Jewish Hungarian-born sociologist, influential in the first half of the 20th century and one of the founding fathers of classical sociology and a founder of the sociology of knowledge.-Life:Mannheim studied in Budapest,...
(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
Max Scheler
Max Scheler was a German philosopher known for his work in phenomenology, ethics, and philosophical anthropology...
(1874–1928), in Versuche zu einer Soziologie des Wissens (1924, Attempts at a Sociology of Knowledge).
Mannheim feared that this interpretation could be seen to claim that all knowledge and beliefs are the products of socio-political forces since this form of relativism
Relativism
Relativism is the concept that points of view have no absolute truth or validity, having only relative, subjective value according to differences in perception and consideration....
is self-defeating (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 believed that relativism
Relativism
Relativism is the concept that points of view have no absolute truth or validity, having only relative, subjective value according to differences in perception and consideration....
was a strange mixture of modern and ancient beliefs in that it contained within itself a belief in an absolute truth which was true for all times and places (the ancient view most often associated with Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
) and condemned other truth claims because they could not achieve this level of objectivity (an idea gleaned from Marx). Mannheim sought to escape this problem with the idea of 'relationism
Relationism
Relationism can refer to:*In social thought, Karl Mannheim pioneered the idea of Relationism, in the development of his theories on the Sociology of Knowledge...
'. This is the idea that certain things are true only in certain times and places (a view influenced by pragmatism
Pragmatism
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition centered on the linking of practice and theory. It describes a process where theory is extracted from practice, and applied back to practice to form what is called intelligent practice...
) however, this does not make them less true. 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.
Phenomenological Sociology
Phenomenological SociologyPhenomenological Sociology
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. The object of such an analysis is the meaningful lived world of everyday life: the Lebenswelt, or...
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. The "object" of such an analysis is the meaningful lived world of everyday life: the "Lebenswelt", or Life-world (Husserl:1889). The task, like that of every other phenomenological investigation, is to describe the formal structures of this object of investigation in subjective terms, as an object-constituted-in-and-for-consciousness (Gurwitsch:1964). That which makes such a description different from the "naive" subjective descriptions of the man in the street, or those of the traditional, positivist social scientist, is the utilization of phenomenological methods.
The leading proponent of Phenomenological Sociology was Alfred Schutz
Alfred Schütz
Alfred Schütz was an Austrian social scientist, whose work bridged sociological and phenomenological traditions to form a social phenomenology, and who is gradually achieving recognition as one of the foremost philosophers of social science of the [twentieth] century.-Life:Schütz was born in...
[1899-1959]. Schutz sought to provide a critical philosophical foundation for Max Weber
Max Weber
Karl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber was a German sociologist and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself...
's interpretive sociology through the use of phenomenological methods derived from the transcendental phenomenological investigations of Edmund Husserl
Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...
[1859-1938]. Husserl's work was directed at establishing the formal structures of intentional consciousness
Consciousness
Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...
. Schutz's work was directed at establishing the formal structures of the Life-world (Schutz:1980). Husserl's work was conducted as a transcendental phenomenology of consciousness. Schutz's work was conducted as a mundane phenomenology of the Life-world (Natanson:1974). The difference in their research projects lies at the level of analysis, the objects taken as topics of study, and the type of phenomenological reduction that is employed for the purposes of analysis.
Ultimately, the two projects should be seen as complementary, with the structures of the latter dependent on the structures of the former. That is, valid phenomenological descriptions of the formal structures of the Life-world should be wholly consistent with the descriptions of the formal structures of intentional consciousness. It is from the latter that the former derives its validity and truth value (Sokolowski:2000).
The phenomenological tie-in with the sociology of knowledge stems from two key historical sources for Mannheim
Mannheim
Mannheim is a city in southwestern Germany. With about 315,000 inhabitants, Mannheim is the second-largest city in the Bundesland of Baden-Württemberg, following the capital city of Stuttgart....
's analysis: [1] Mannheim was dependent on insights derived from Husserl's phenomenological investigations, especially the theory of meaning as found in Husserl's Logical Investigations of 1900/1901 (Husserl:2000), in the formulation of his central methodological work: "On The Interpretation of Weltanschauung" (Mannheim:1993:see fn41 & fn43) - this essay forms the centerpiece for Mannheim's method of historical understanding and is central to his conception of the sociology of knowledge as a research program; and [2] The concept of "Weltanschauung" employed by Mannheim has its origins in the hermeneutic philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey, who relied on Husserl's theory of meaning (above) for his methodological specification of the interpretive act (Mannheim: 1993: see fn38).
It is also noteworthy that Husserl's analysis of the formal structures of consciousness, and Schuetz's analysis of the formal structures of the Life-world are specifically intended to establish the foundations, in consciousness, for the understanding and interpretation of a social world which is subject to cultural and historical change. The phenomenological position is that although the facticity
Facticity
Facticity has a multiplicity of meanings from "factuality" and "contingency" to the intractable conditions of human existence.The term is first used by Fichte and has a variety of meanings...
of the social world may be culturally and historically relative, the formal structures of consciousness, and the processes by which we come to know and understand this facticity
Facticity
Facticity has a multiplicity of meanings from "factuality" and "contingency" to the intractable conditions of human existence.The term is first used by Fichte and has a variety of meanings...
, are not. That is, the understanding of any actual social world is unavoidably dependent on understanding the structures and processes of consciousness that found, and constitute, any possible social world.
Alternatively, if the facticity
Facticity
Facticity has a multiplicity of meanings from "factuality" and "contingency" to the intractable conditions of human existence.The term is first used by Fichte and has a variety of meanings...
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 which 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.
Michel Foucault
A particularly important contemporary contribution to the sociology of knowledge is found in the work of Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization (1961) postulated 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 SzaszThomas Szasz
Thomas Stephen Szasz is a psychiatrist and academic. Since 1990 he has been Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse, New York. He is a well-known social critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry, and of the social...
, at the time the foremost critic of psychiatry
Psychiatry
Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the study and treatment of mental disorders. These mental disorders include various affective, behavioural, cognitive and perceptual abnormalities...
, 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". In The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception (1963), Foucault extended his critique to institutional clinical medicine, arguing for the central conceptual metaphor
Conceptual metaphor
In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor, or cognitive metaphor, refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain, in terms of another, for example, understanding quantity in terms of directionality . A conceptual domain can be any coherent organization of human experience...
of "The Gaze", which had implications for medical education
Medical education
Medical education is education related to the practice of being a medical practitioner, either the initial training to become a doctor or additional training thereafter ....
, prison design, and the carceral state
Carceral state
A Carceral archipelago refers to French social theorist Michel Foucault's work on surveillance systems and their technologies over modern societies and its practice of social control and discipline over its population in all areas of social life.Taken from his classic work Discipline and punish...
as understood today. Concepts of criminal justice
Criminal justice
Criminal Justice is the system of practices and institutions of governments directed at upholding social control, deterring and mitigating crime, or sanctioning those who violate laws with criminal penalties and rehabilitation efforts...
and its intersection with medicine were better developed in this work than in Szasz and others, who confined their critique to current psychiatric practice. 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. These, he claimed, had transformed 17th and 18th century studies of "general grammar" into modern "linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
", "natural history
Natural history
Natural history is the scientific research of plants or animals, leaning more towards observational rather than experimental methods of study, and encompasses more research published in magazines than in academic journals. Grouped among the natural sciences, natural history is the systematic study...
" into modern "biology
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...
", and "analysis of wealth" into modern "economics
Economics
Economics is the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...
"; though not, claimed Foucault, without loss of meaning. The 19th century transformed what knowledge was.
Perhaps Foucault's best-known claim was that "Man did not exist" before the 18th century. Foucault regarded notions of humanity and of humanism
Humanism
Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....
as inventions modernity
Modernity
Modernity typically refers to a post-traditional, post-medieval historical period, one marked by the move from feudalism toward capitalism, industrialization, secularization, rationalization, the nation-state and its constituent institutions and forms of surveillance...
. Accordingly, a cognitive bias
Cognitive bias
A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations. Implicit in the concept of a "pattern of deviation" is a standard of comparison; this may be the judgment of people outside those particular situations, or may be a set of independently verifiable...
had been introduced unwittingly into science, by over-trusting the individual doctor or scientist's ability to see and state things objectively. Foucault roots this argument in the rediscovery of Kant, though his thought is significantly influenced by Nietzsche - that philosopher declaring the "death of God" in the 19th century, and the anti-humanists proposing the "death of Man" in the 20th.
In Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, Foucault concentrates on the correlation between knowledge
Knowledge
Knowledge is a familiarity with someone or something unknown, which can include information, facts, descriptions, or skills acquired through experience or education. It can refer to the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject...
and power. According to him, knowledge is a form of power and can conversely be used against individuals as a form of power. As a result, knowledge is socially constructed in order to maintain the power of the ruling class
Ruling class
The term ruling class refers to the social class of a given society that decides upon and sets that society's political policy - assuming there is one such particular class in the given society....
. He argues that knowledge forms discourses and discourses form the dominant ideological ways of thinking which govern our lives. For him, social control is maintained in ‘the disciplinary society’, through codes of control over sexuality and the ideas/knowledge perpetuated through social institutions. In other words, discourses and ideologies subject us to authority and turn people into ‘subjected beings’, who are in turn afraid of being punished if they sway from social norms. Foucault believes that institutions overtly regulate and control our lives. Institutions such as schools reinforce the dominant ideological forms of thinking onto the populace and force us into becoming obedient and docile beings. Hence, the dominant ideology that serves the interests of the ruling class, all while appearing as `neutral`, needs to be questioned and must not go unchallenged.
Knowledge ecology
Knowledge ecology is a concept originating from knowledge managementKnowledge management
Knowledge management comprises a range of strategies and practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences...
and that aimed at "bridging the gap between the static data repositories of knowledge management and the dynamic, adaptive behavior of natural systems", and in particular relying on the concept of interaction and emergence
Emergence
In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems....
.
Knowledge ecology, and its related concept information ecology
Information ecology
In the context of an evolving information society, the term information ecology marks a connection between ecological ideas with the dynamics and properties of the increasingly dense, complex and important digital informational environment and has been gaining progressively wider acceptance in a...
has been elaborated by different academics and practitioners such as Thomas H. Davenport
Thomas H. Davenport
Thomas H. Davenport is an American academic and author specializing in business process innovation and knowledge management...
, Bonnie Nardi
Bonnie Nardi
Bonnie Nardi is an anthropologist who most recent work concerns virtual worlds. Her book My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft was published by the University of Michigan Press . She is co-author Bonnie Nardi is an anthropologist who most recent work...
, or Swidler.
New Sociology of Knowledge
The New Sociology of Knowledge introduces new concepts that dictate how knowledge is socialized in the modern era by new kinds of social organizations and structures .Robert K. Merton
American sociologist Robert K. MertonRobert K. Merton
Robert King Merton was a distinguished American sociologist. He spent most of his career teaching at Columbia University, where he attained the rank of University Professor...
(1910 – 2003) dedicates a section of Social Theory and Social Structure
Social Theory and Social Structure
Social Theory and Social Structure was a landmark publication in sociology by Robert K. Merton. It has been translated into close to 20 languages and is one of the most frequently cited texts in social sciences...
(1949; revised and expanded, 1957 and 1968) to the study of the sociology of knowledge in Part III, titled The Sociology of Knowledge and Mass Communications.
See also
- Sociology of scientific knowledgeSociology of scientific knowledgeThe sociology of scientific knowledge ' is the study of science as a social activity, especially dealing "with the social conditions and effects of science, and with the social structures and processes of scientific activity."...
- Socially constructed reality
- Social constructivismSocial constructivismSocial constructivism is a sociological theory of knowledge that applies the general philosophical constructionism into social settings, wherein groups construct knowledge for one another, collaboratively creating a small culture of shared artifacts with shared meanings...
- Epistemology
- OntologyOntologyOntology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...
- Knowledge ManagementKnowledge managementKnowledge management comprises a range of strategies and practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences...
- KnowledgeKnowledgeKnowledge is a familiarity with someone or something unknown, which can include information, facts, descriptions, or skills acquired through experience or education. It can refer to the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject...
Sociologists of Knowledge
- Émile DurkheimÉmile DurkheimDavid Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology.Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain...
- Marcel MaussMarcel MaussMarcel Mauss was a French sociologist. The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss' academic work traversed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology...
- Max SchelerMax SchelerMax Scheler was a German philosopher known for his work in phenomenology, ethics, and philosophical anthropology...
- Karl MannheimKarl MannheimKarl Mannheim , or Károly Mannheim in the original writing of his name, was a Jewish Hungarian-born sociologist, influential in the first half of the 20th century and one of the founding fathers of classical sociology and a founder of the sociology of knowledge.-Life:Mannheim studied in Budapest,...
- Alfred SchutzAlfred SchützAlfred Schütz was an Austrian social scientist, whose work bridged sociological and phenomenological traditions to form a social phenomenology, and who is gradually achieving recognition as one of the foremost philosophers of social science of the [twentieth] century.-Life:Schütz was born in...
- Harold GarfinkelHarold GarfinkelHarold Garfinkel was a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is known for establishing and developing ethnomethodology as a field of inquiry in sociology.-Biography:...
- Peter L. BergerPeter L. BergerPeter Ludwig Berger is an Austrian-born American sociologist well known for his work, co-authored with Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge .-Biography:...
- Thomas LuckmannThomas LuckmannThomas Luckmann is a German sociologist of Slovene origin. His main areas of research are the sociology of communication, Sociology of knowledge, sociology of religion, and the philosophy of science.- Biography :...
- Michel FoucaultMichel FoucaultMichel Foucault , born Paul-Michel Foucault , was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas...