Sociologism and sociology: Cognitive styles of sociological explanation

Recent debates in sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) and science and technology studies (STS) drew attention to the one of the most crucial sociology’s axiomatic assumptions – Durkheimian imperative of explaining “Social by Social”. Since this classical statement becomes problematic social sciences have to deal with the radical epistemological claims and proclamations: from declaring “the end of the Social” (by B. Latour) to announcing “the death of the Method” (by J. Law).

However it’s too easy and too tempting to label such claims as “postmodernist gestures” or as “ungrounded revisionism” (S. Fuchs). Radical epistemology made the move that should not be ignored or neglected. In response to epistemological criticism we need to find a new basis for understanding sociological explanations as explanations sui generis. The power of these explanations, as I’ll try to prove in my brief presentation, is based not on infallibility of statistical measurement neither on striking convincingness of empirical data. Sociology’s ability to provide convincing explanation of phenomena (framed as “social” and consequently “requiring sociological explanation”) is guaranteed by its own cognitive style: a set of cognitive operations that determine not mere constructing specific sociological narratives but our ability to see things sociologically (H. Garfinkel).

The notion of cognitive style defines sociological explanation as the kind of “cognitive work” with its own mechanics: operations of demarcation (“…the knowledge as a social phenomena should be distinguished from physical and psychological characteristics of knowledge producers”), relevance attributions(“psychology and physics are irrelevant to the proper study of knowledge”), conceptualization (“social knowledge is social product”) and, finally, reduction (“the infrastructure of academic community explains why that specific knowledge being produced”).