User:DarwinPeacock/Temp/Epistemology

Contemporary epistemological issues
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 actually speak directly to each other. To complicate the issues further, few practicing scholars explicitly state their epistemological commitments, and thus their epistemological position thus has to be guessed 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).

20th century antipositivism
The extent to which the discipline should be conducted scientifically has continued to be questioned on ontological and epistemological questions, such as on how to emphasize or integrate subjectivity, objectivity, intersubjectivity and pragmatism in the conduct of theory and research, as well as other issues in science meta-theory. 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), that "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." Verstehende social theory has been the concern of phenomenological works, such as Alfred Schütz' Phenomenology of the Social World (1932). Phenomenology would later prove influential in the subject-centred theory of the post-structuralists. The linguistic turn turn 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.

Quantitative Methodologists
The scholars termed "positivist" rarely take part 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:

In this view, statistics is not only compatible with the unobservability of social processes, but is rather necessitated by this fact--and they thus accuse the ones not practicing quantitative methods 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.

Structure and agency


Structure and agency forms an enduring debate in social theory: "Do social structures determine an individual's behaviour or does human agency?" In this context 'agency' refers to the capacity of individuals to act independently and make free choices, whereas 'structure' refers to factors which limit or affect the choices and actions of individuals (such as social class, religion, gender, ethnicity, and so on). Discussions over the primacy of either structure and agency relate to the core of social ontology ("What is the social world made of?", "What is a cause in the social world, and what is an effect?"). One attempt to reconcile postmodern critiques with the overarching project of social science has been the development, particularly in Britain, of critical realism. For critical realists such as Roy Bhaskar, traditional positivism commits an 'epistemic fallacy' by failing to address the ontological conditions which make science possible: that is, structure and agency itself. A general outcome of incredulity toward structural or agential thought has been the development of multidimensional theories, most notably the action theory of Talcott Parsons and Anthony Giddens's theory of structuration.

Epistemology in practice
In spite of sustained critique from social theorists, "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 positivists is also deemed more 'trustworthy' and 'unbiased' by the greater public (though this judgment is continues to be challenged by antipositivists), and it retains more influence in public policy.