Editor’s introduction: The possibilities of sociological knowledge

Abstract

In this issue, we offer a set of wide ranging reflections, as well as empirical research, on the nature of knowledge in the field of sociology, and on the possibilities for knowl edge in the future. As Bruce Keith notes in his introductory essay, some papers were originally written for plenary sessions at the centennial annual meeting in Philadelphia in 2005.1 am deeply grateful to Bruce for his meticulous work as the organizer of these articles, and as my liaison with the authors during the process of final revisions. My own engagement with the problem of sociological knowledge was deeply influ enced by my encounter with Pitirim A. Sorokin's massive study, Social and Cultural Dynamics (four volumes, 1937-1941), which remains one of the most ambitious works ever produced in the sociology of knowledge. In Sorokin's view, the history of 25 centu ries of Western culture exhibited a dialectic between spiritual and secular "culture men talities," each of which served as an organizing principle for socioculturel orders (e.g., Classical Greece or Medieval Europe), including their art, music, literature, law, sci ence, politics, religion, economics, technology, and social relations generally. Accord ing to his analysis, as dominant culture mentalities entered a period of decline and crisis, the issue of "What is knowledge?" became a central problematic. Thus, at the end of a religious age, the sources of "revealed knowledge" (e.g., scriptures, prophecies) lost credibility, whereas in the final period of a secular age the sources of empirical-sensory knowledge no longer provided certainty. Sorokin therefore situated what he regarded as the crisis of sociology within the much broader crisis of Western culture, in which "modern science" had served for several centuries as the ultimate standard of "knowledge" (displacing philosophy and religion). By the 1930s, however, the field of physics?regarded as the "hardest of the hard sci ences"?had moved away from claims of absolute knowledge, as a result of the emer gence of Einstein's Relativity Theory, Heisenberg^ "Uncertainty Principle " and the revo lutionary perspective of quantum mechanics. This admission that scientific knowledge was, at best, probabilistic had far reaching implications for the possibility of knowledge in the social sciences, where knowledge had always been regarded as largely subjective. A case in point, that illustrates the accuracy of Sorokin's overall view, can be found in the field of economics, where a widespread "crisis of theory" has been recognized de spite a half century of intensive efforts to make economics a mathematicized "hard sci