Stephen Turner

The question of whether sociology progresses, and how, has been an issue within sociology itself. In this chapter, the reasons for this are explored. The first set relates to the status of ‘theories’ in sociology, which, despite historical aspirations to universality, are not predictive systems that generate puzzles but second-order definitions and ideal types, which abstract over intelligible world of the subjects. They can loosely be said to progress in the sense of providing new ways of framing in response to generically defined concerns, such as the stability of elites, and novel social situations. The second set relates to quantitative models. Examples from causal modelling, a basic form of statistical modelling, are discussed to show how this same problem bears on them. They depend on assumptions about which correlations can be plausibly regarded as causal, and which are outside the system and can be ignored. As the social world changes, these assumptions gain or lose plausibility, and the models themselves lose applicability and predictive power. Change here amounts to providing a better fit to novel situations. But the models are purpose relative and the aims, and therefore progress, are externally defined, typically by changing normative or policy concerns.

The blogosphere is loathed and feared by the press, expert-opinion makers, and representatives of authority generally. Part of this is based on a social theory: that there are implicit and explicit social controls governing professional journalists and experts that make them responsible to the facts. These controls don't exist for bloggers or the people who comment on blogs. But blog commentary is good at performing a kind of sociology of knowledge that situates speakers and motives, especially in cases of complex professional and administrative decision-making, as well as providing specific factual material that qualifies claims of experts and authorities. In many contexts the commentaries are examples of Habermasian demands for justification, to which there is a response. A major topic in women's health, and on the blogs, is the effects of hysterectomy, especially accompanied by oophorectomy, the removal of ovaries. Physicians make extreme claims on web pages about the lack of consequences, or their manageability through hormone therapy, which they claim is supported by research. Blog posters, and a blog opposed to hysterectomy generally, claim that there are numerous damaging effects, and deconstruct the claims of experts. Blog posters fill in the claims with personal experiences and analysis of the conduct of physicians and nurses, as well as the motives of women who deny symptoms. Physicians provide their own critique and analysis of the blogs, to which they attribute great influence. A later meta-analysis and new longitudinal research affirms the bloggers, and explains why much of the research cited by experts is wrong.

Cognition, and mental processes, played an important role in early social theory, especially in the thought of Comte and Spencer, but a gradually reduced role in the “classics,” and a minimal role in what became the “Standard Social Science Model.” This is now changing, so this history has become quite relevant. Comte is known for his interest in phrenology, but this interest took the form of a critique of phrenology as well as of the faculty psychology of the time. This critique pointed toward a modern view of cognition. Herbert Spencer, whose reputation in cognitive science is deservedly high, provided a fully developed account of basic cognition that pointed to key issues of societal explanation that preserved individualism, supporting a view of society as a spontaneous order, and also qualified his view of the social organism. Despite his great influence, this development was largely cut off when social scientists absorbed and transformed neo-Kantianism and combined it with Völkerpsychologie into a model of culture that transferred cognitive issues to the collective level. The later social psychological use of “attitude” as a surrogate for cognitive processes also blocked a cognitively based account of society, as proposed by sociologists like Charles Ellwood.

Characterizing science as a public good, as Steve Fuller notes, is a part of an ideological construal of science, linked to a particular portrayal of science in the postwar era that was designed to provide a rationale for the funding of pure or basic science. The image of science depended on the idea of scientists as autonomous truth-seekers. But the funding system, and other hierarchies, effectively eliminated this autonomy, and bound scientists tightly to a competitive system in which the opportunity to pursue ideas in science depended on peer approval in advance. Funding agencies then turned to assessments of impact. John Ziman had already recognized the effects of these changes in the nature of science, and characterized it as “reliable knowledge” produced on demand from funders. As the competition for funds increased, there were further changes in the nature of science itself toward “reliable enough” knowledge. This made science into a “good”. but a good in the sense of results produced for funders, a transformation that left the original epistemic aims of science behind.

Freud was a major cultural and intellectual influence in the twentieth century, whose significance waned. Kaye’s exposition argues that part of the reason is that his presentation of himself as a medical scientist obscured his true interest in society and thus the social theory that informed his commentary on culture. In support of this argument he reconstructs the social theory. The reconstruction exhibits some familiar problems: the question of how deep motivations relating to the parricide hypothesis are transmitted over millennia, the plausibility of the family drama itself, the question of the cultural origins of Freud’s own perspective, and the plausibility and historical specificity of his cultural diagnosis. The paper comments on some of the prehistory of these problems to contextualize Freud, and to discuss the problem of resonance: the dependence of acceptance of his arguments on seeing the mechanisms in oneself.

The Liberal Theory of Science, best articulated by Michael Polanyi, held that science advanced when autonomous scientists followed their best hunches and spontaneously coordinated their efforts as a result of their mutual dependence, in a setting devoted to scientific truth with a tradition supporting it, in a quest for a comprehensive understanding of reality. Pure science was for him an international community with the characteristics of the Republic of Letters of the past. This image of science was an idealization at the time he wrote, and became less applicable as science grew and became more dependent on funding decisions, and therefore also on peer review, which compromised autonomy. From the painful attempts to make sense of these changes, particularly in the writings of John Ziman, we can reconstruct the effects of these changes: initially from a focus on discovery to the production of “reliable knowledge” for sponsors. This change made science more useful, but at a price, and made the Liberal Theory of Science increasingly irrelevant to actual science, but still useful as a basis for critique.

Charles Ellwood is usually described as a junior member of the founding generation of American Sociology. Ellwood fulfils many of the standard stereotypes of the American sociology student of the era. He was born on a farm and, after winning a state scholarship, went to Cornell, as he himself noted, ‘because it was virtually the state university of New York’.1 He then went directly on to the University of Chicago, where he was converted only partially from his concerns with social problems to a theorist. He was one of the first PhDs in sociology from the University, and the first Chicago Sociology PhD to hold a position in sociology at a major university other than Chicago itself: a large land grant university in the Midwest, Missouri. He stayed there for most of his career until leaving for Duke, an institution with a strong religious orientation that prized him for his religious writings.

This chapter explores the background ideas are deeply rooted in the history of philosophy, and interact with it in complex ways. It discusses the elements out of which later sociology of knowledge was constructed. The classical sociology of knowledge is an attempt to construct a neutral account of ideology and related concepts. The prime example of an organic period was the medieval period, in which religion, political ideology, and forms of the division of labor and authority fit together as a whole and in which the intellectual aspects of social life justified and explained the social order, which was a productive order and division of labor. K. Mannheim uses the term ideology in a specific way, unlike its later use, and uses the term “utopia” for what would normally be called ideology. Mannheim distinguishes utopia and ideology by saying that ideologies are concrete: in fact they are a lot like practices, or habitus.

The status and nature of the state have been the traditional source of claims about the reality of supra-individual social entities. Kelsen was the dissolver of this problematic, by asserting the identity of state and law, and asserting that law was the authorized actions of individuals. But this required an account of the origin of law itself. He traced this to pre-state law, and the normative order of retribution, which he explained as part of a primitive mentality that depended on an undeveloped ego and conceived causality collectively and magically, to include the dead and nature. The casually responsible individual as understood in modern law resulted from the overcoming of these notions.