The Two Parts of Sociological Objectivity
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2022
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003193517-15
Abstract
The problem of objectivity has deep roots in the history of sociology, reaching back to the pre-sociological era of social and labor statistics. The admissibility of the section on statistics to the British Association for the Advancement of Science had already raised this issue in the 1840s, and it continued with the labor statistics movement of the later 19th century. The repeated conflicts involved what can be seen as two competing concepts: objectivity as fairness and objectivity as pure factuality. Each was guaranteed by something: fairness by institutional arrangements and purity by methods. The greatest successes of sociology in the face of social conflict occurred when the two coincided, as they did in the study of the 1919 Race Riots in Chicago. More often they did not, leading to the dueling perspectives represented by Robert Lynd in Knowledge for What? and George Lundberg’s Can Science Save Us? , followed by Howard Becker’s “Whose Side Are We On?.” These conflicts continue to the present, and can be illuminated by the work of Miranda Fricker on epistemic injustice and Ted Porter on Trust in Numbers. The conflict, however, is unequal in one respect: what counts as fairness shifts as moral saliences shift, and although concepts of purity and method also shift, they have more continuity and stability. Today, the productive interaction between the two forms has broken down, in multiple settings, notably that of race, threatening the enterprise of sociology as a whole with collapse into ideology.
Was this content written or created while at USF?
Yes
Citation / Publisher Attribution
The Two Parts of Sociological Objectivity, in R. Leroux, T. Martin & S. Turner (Eds.), The Future of Sociology: Ideology or Objective Social Science?, Routledge, p. 195-214
Scholar Commons Citation
Turner, Stephen, "The Two Parts of Sociological Objectivity" (2022). Philosophy Faculty Publications. 353.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/phi_facpub/353
