User:DarwinPeacock/Temp/ModernEpistemologyAndPractice

Modern epistemology and practise

Main article: Philosophy of social science

Echos of the "positivist" and "antipositivist" debate persist today, though this conflict is hard to define. Authors writing in different epistemological perspectives do not phrase their disagreements in the same terms and rarely engage in dialogue. To complicate the issue further, few practicing scholars explicitly state their epistemological commitments, and thus their epistemological position is assumed from other sources, such as choice of methodology or theory. However, no perfect correspondence between these categories exists. One scholar has described this debate in terms of the social construction of the "other", with each side defining the other by what it is not rather than what it is, and then proceeding to attribute far greater homogeneity to their opponents than actually exists. Thus, it is better to understand this not as a debate but as two different arguments: the "antipositivist" articulation of a social meta-theory which includes a philosophical critique of scientism, and "positivist" development of a scientific research methodology for sociology with accompanying critiques of the reliability and validity of work that they see as violating such standards.

Quantitative Methodologists

The scholars termed "positivist" rarely partake in the epistemological debate as it is conceived by the "antipositivists": in fact, most of the positivist positions critiqued in antipositivist writing are formulated by their critics. Instead, "positivists" usually conceive of themselves as quantitative researchers, and see the debate as a methodological one. They tend to reject the terms on which antipositivists characterize their position. For example, many of them would assert that the impossibility of perfectly observing social processes lies at the root of their epistemology: "Key issues are the question of object and how object relates to subjectivity. Although positivism is often cast as a model of object that denies subjectivity, precisely the reverse can be argued. The science of light, surveying, engineering and physics are all quick to allow that object is a theoretical ideal which must be approximated through human experience, social constructions."

In this view, statistics is not only compatible with the unobservability of social processes, but is rather necessitated by this fact: stochasticity makes it so that the observable traces left by social processes are hard for humans to interpret without statistical help. Such scholars thus accuse qualitative methodologists of assuming a social reality that can be accessed directly. Many quantitative researchers also take issue with the critique that they are ignoring the necessarily value-laden nature of observation. They argue that the canons of science are always value-laden, but that these values are the values of science: skepticism, rigor and modesty. Just as some antipositivists see their position as a moral commitment egalitarian values, quantitative researchers see their methods as driven by a moral commitment to these scientific values.

Epistemology in practice

Some subfields of the discipline (for example, cultural sociology) are studied primarily by non-positivist researchers. However, researchers using "positivist" methodologies hold the dominant position in sociology, especially in the United States. Articles in top sociology journals generally follow a positivist logic of argument, and have the same format and style of exposition as natural science articles. In the discipline's two most cited journals, American Journal of Sociology and American Sociological Review, quantitative articles have historically outnumbered qualitative ones by a factor of two. (most articles published in the British Journal of Sociology, on the other hand, are qualitative.) Most textbooks on the methodology of social research are written from the quantitative perspective, and the very term "methodology" is often used synonymously with "statistics." Practically all sociology PhD program in the United States require training in statistical methods. The work produced by quantitative researchers is also deemed more 'trustworthy' and 'unbiased' by the greater public, though this judgment is continues to be challenged by antipositivists.

20th century antipositivism

Anthony Giddens

The extent to which the discipline should be conducted scientifically remains a salient issue with respect to basic ontological and epistemological assumptions on how to emphasize or integrate subjectivity, objectivity, intersubjectivity and pragmatism in the conduct of theory and research. Early German hermeneuticians such as Wilhelm Dilthey pioneered the distinction between natural and social science ('Geisteswissenschaft'). This tradition greatly informed Weber and Simmel's antipositivism, and continued with critical theory. Since the 1960s a general weakening of deductivist accounts of science has grown side-by-side with critiques of "scientism", or science as ideology. Jürgen Habermas argues, in his On the Logic of the Social Sciences (1967): "...the positivist thesis of unified science, which assimilates all the sciences to a natural-scientific model, fails because of the intimate relationship between the social sciences and history, and the fact that they are based on a situation-specific understanding of meaning that can be explicated only hermeneutically ... access to a symbolically prestructured reality cannot be gained by observation alone."

The linguistic turn and the influence of phenomenology led to a rise in highly abstract sociology in general, as well as so-called "postmodern" perspectives on the social acquisition of knowledge. Michel Foucault provides a potent critique in his archaeology of the human sciences, though Habermas and Richard Rorty have both argued that Foucault merely replaces one such system of thought with another. The dialogue between these intellectuals highlights a trend in recent years for certain schools of sociology and philosophy to intersect: "According to Giddens, the 'orthodox consensus' terminated in the late 1960s and 1970s as the middle ground shared by otherwise competing perspectives gave way and was replaced by a baffling variety of competing perspectives. This third 'generation' of social theory includes phenomenologically inspired approaches, critical theory, ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism, structuralism, post-structuralism, and theories written in the tradition of hermeneutics and ordinary language philosophy."

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