Sociology of knowledge – The Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Sociology of knowledge – Verbete da “The Encyclopedia of Philosophy” – Paul Edward, Editor in Chief. vol VII. Collier Macmillan Publishers, London.
Social origin of ideas. While there is general agreement among .scholars in the field that social relationships provide the key to the understanding of the genesis of ideas, there are also far-reaching disagreements among several distinct schools, within which there are again individual differences. An attempt will be made here only to characterize the three most important basic attitudes.
Materialist school. A materialist group of writers emphasizes that human beings are creatures of nature before they are creatures of society and tends to see human beings as dominated by certain genetic drives, with decisive consequences for their emergent mentalities. Nietzsche, for instance, ascribed to man an elementary will to power; if this will is frustrated by a barrier, self-consolatory ideas are apt to appear. Christianity is one such idea; it is essentially a philosophy of “soul graper", a "slave morality." It assures the defeated that they are really superior to those who have defeated them.
Vilfredo Pareto’s Trattato di sociologia generate is the most elaborate statement of this position. According to Pareto, men act first and think of reasons for their action only afterward. These reasons he calls "derivations" because they are derived from, or secondary to, the "residues," or quasi instincts, which in fact determine human modes of conduct and, through them, human modes of thought as well. This school continued the line initiated by the rationalists. Theirs is a doctrine of ideologies which devalues thought while it accounts for its formation.
Idealist school A second group of writers asserts that every society has to come to some decision about the Absolute and that this decision will act as a basic premise that determines the content of the culture. Juan Donoso Cortes tried to explain the classical Greek world view as the product of heathen preconceptions about the Absolute, and the medieval world view as the product of Christian-Catholic preconceptions. An ambitious presentation of this theory is Pitirim Sorokin s Social and Cultural Dynamics. He distinguishes three basic metaphysics that, prevailing in given societies, color all their thinking. If a realm beyond space and time is posited as the Absolute, as in ancient India, an "ideational" mentality will spring up; if the realm inside space and time is posited as the Absolute, as in the modern West, a "sensate" mentality will come into being; and if, finally, reality is ascribed both to the here and now and to the beyond, as in the high Middle Ages, an "idealistic" mentality will be the result. Sorokin’s doctrine is itself idealistic in character and finds its ultimate inspiration in a religious attitude.
Sociologists of knowledge. The third group of writers occupies the middle ground. These writers do not go beyond the human sphere but divide it into a primary and conditioning half and a secondary and conditioned one. There is, however, great diversity of opinion over exactly which social facts should be regarded as conditioning thought. Marx, for instance, held that relations of production, which themselves reflect still more basic property relations, were primary, but many other factors, such as power relations, have been singled out by other thi nkers. Still others regard the social constitution as a whole as the substructure of knowledge, thought, and culture. A typical representative of this numerous group is W. G. Sumner. In his classic Folkways, he suggested that wherever men try to live together, they develop mutual adjustments which harden into a set of customs, supported and secured by social sanctions, which permanently coordinate and control their conduct. These habits of action have as their concomitants habits of the mind, a generalized ethos that permeates the mental life of the society concerned. This theory can be sharpened by formulating it in axiological terms. A society is a society because, and insofar as, it is attuned to certain selected and hierarchically ordered values. These values determine what lines of endeavor will be pursued both in practice and in theory.
This third group represents the sociology of knowledge in the narrower and proper sense of the word. The theory just summed up has received some empirical confirmation through the discovery that societies do gain mental consistency to the degree-that they achieve better human coordination and integration.
Relation of a society to ideas expressed in it. The problem next in importance to the identification of the substructure of knowledge is the explanation of its relation to the superstructure. Here again there are three schools which may, but do not always, correspond to those already discussed. One tendency is toward causalism. The positiv-ists Gustav Ratzenhofer and Hip
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