In recent years, culture studies and cultural history have become very popular approaches in the humanities. This is all to the good, but the notion of "culture" is used in several different ways, and they aren't compatible with one another. In this post, I want to look at two of these notions of culture and the problems they cause; I'll look at some others later.
Continue reading "Concepts of culture. 1: Social science vs. criticism" »
I said I was going to discuss some common errors in the science (or culture) wars. Here, I want to deal with one of the claims most irritating to sociologists-- the accusation that sociologists think that "truth is a popularity context" or that "anyone's opinion is just as good as anyone else's". This view is irritating just because it gets things so completely backwards.
When I started this blog, I thought that I'd avoid the running debates which make up the "science wars" front in the "culture wars". Bruno Latour's book and Michael Lynch's book are two very reasonable (and arguable) approaches by social scientists who often agree; here is a rich lode of materials on the other side.
I'm reluctant to get into these debates because I think that most of the points brought up the opposition are irrelevant to the problems of understanding how and why institutions (scientific or otherwise) work the way they do. I also think that many of the arguments in the science wars are of very poor quality. But avoiding the debates is an idle fantasy, and low quality is not a strong barrier to broad acceptance of an argument. So I find myself driven to deal with some of the more common mistakes which appear discussions of science studies. I'm going to try doing this in series of relatively short posts, dealing with one problem at a time.
Continue reading "Does "socially constructed" mean "not real"?" »
