higher school of economics, moscow philosophy of social science roundtable ecole normale supérieure...
TRANSCRIPT
Higher School of Economics,Moscow
Philosophy of Social Science
Roundtable
Ecole Normale
Supérieure20.03.2011
Greg Yudin
Reflexivity at the crossroads:
Form reflexive objectification to reflexive subjectification
Greg Yudin
Reflexivity at the crossroads
Pierre Bourdieu
1930 2002
Greg Yudin
Reflexivity at the crossroads
1. What is new about reflexive sociology from an epistemological point of view?
2. Does reflexive sociology live up to the expectations?
3. What is implied by ‘epistemology’?
4. Phenomenological roots of ‘reflection’
5. Reflexive sociology: useful if correctly understood. Implications
Outline of the talk
Greg Yudin
Reflexivity at the crossroads
Bringing epistemology to existence
Reflexive sociology
Between objectivism and subjectivism:
“taking the things of logic for the logic of things” vs. ‘synoptic illusion’
“Social world constructs its own representation, by using sociology and the sociologist for
this purpose” (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992)
Pierre Bourdieu’s Epistemology
Greg Yudin
Reflexivity at the crossroads
Weber: Wertfreiheit
Mannheim: freischwebende Intelligenz
Merton: scientific ethos
Social determination in epistemology
Away from determination
Greg Yudin
Reflexivity at the crossroads
Sociology of sociology
“uses the knowledge it gains of the social determinations that may bear upon [so-ciology], and particularly the scientific
analysis of all the constraints and all the limitations associated with the fact of
occupying a definite position in a definite field at a particular moment and with a
certain trajectory, in an attempt to locate and neutralize their effects” (Bourdieu &
Wacquant 1992).
Social determination in epistemology-2
Greg Yudin
Reflexivity at the crossroads
Wertfreiheit:
corrects all distortions
The promise of reflexive sociology
Sensitivity to historical challenges:
doesn’t take sociological observer away from his milieu
Greg Yudin
Reflexivity at the crossroads
“The intellectual has the privilege of being placed in conditions that enable him to
strive to understand his generic and specific conditions. In so doing, he can
hope to free himself (in part at least) and to offer others the means of liberation...
The sociologist’s privilege, if he has one, is not that of trying to remain suspended
above those whom he classifies, but that of knowing he is classified and knowing
roughly where he stands in the classifications” (Bourdieu 1993)
The promise of reflexive sociology-2
Greg Yudin
Reflexivity at the crossroads
Criticism of sociology of knowledge
Extra-social viewpoint?
“The failure of Bourdieu's theory is instructive, because it clearly shows why no more reflexivity can ever be granted to theorists than is already granted by such a theory to agents themselves”
(Bohman 1997)
Vicious circle (Pels 2003)
‘Radical reflexivity’ is devastating and self-destructive (Lynch 2000)
Objections
Greg Yudin
Reflexivity at the crossroads
Reflexive sociology fails to rise above partiality
No way past determinations causing biases
No road to consensus among subjects
No access to an impartial view
No panoptical objectivity
Panoptical objectivity
Greg Yudin
Reflexivity at the crossroads
“epistemology differs from abstract methodology inasmuch as it strives to
grasp the logic of error in order to construct the logic of discovery of truth as
a polemic against error and as an endeavor to subject the approximated
truths of science and the methods it uses to methodical, permanent rectification”
(Bourdieu et al. 1991 [1968])
Epistemology?
Greg Yudin
Reflexivity at the crossroads
“Scientific experience is an experience that contradicts common experience”
(Bachelard 1938).
Epistemological obstacles
Doxa vs. episteme
Episteme: 1) objectifies doxa
2) overcomes doxa
Bachelard’s Epistemology
Greg Yudin
Reflexivity at the crossroads
1) those produced by a particular position an agent occupies in the field
2) those related to collective unconscious of the particular field under scrutiny
3) those related to academic field, skholè
(Bourdieu 2000)
Epistemological rupture: • discontinuity of cognition
• existential dimension
Presuppositions of common experience
Greg Yudin
Reflexivity at the crossroads
Primary, pre-predicative and pre-reflexive experience
Already there
“True being is everywhere an ideal goal, a task of episteme or "reason," as opposed to
being which through doxa is merely thought to be, unquestioned and "obvious." (Husserl 1970 [1936]).
Doxa in Husserl
Greg Yudin
Reflexivity at the crossroads
Science is ‘grounded’ in doxa
“Out of the undetermined universal form of the life-world, space and time, and the
manifold of empirical intuitable shapes that can be imagined into it, it made for the first time an objective world in the true sense—
i.e., an infinite totality of ideal objects which are determinable univocally,
methodically, and quite universally for everyone” (Husserl 1970[1936])
No room for subjectivity
Science & doxa
Greg Yudin
Reflexivity at the crossroads
Method of phenomenology
From naïve-natural attitude to reflexive attitude
Epoché (temporary suspension)
Overcoming and objectifying doxa
Back to subjectivity
Phenomenological reduction
Greg Yudin
Reflexivity at the crossroads
1) objectification is subjectification
(Humean problem: ‘how is this most radical subjectivism, which subjectivizes the world
itself, comprehensible’ (Husserl 1970[1936])
2) subjectification means overcoming
Phenomenological reduction-2
Greg Yudin
Reflexivity at the crossroads
Ideas I (1913): “The unrestricted doubt is within the realm of our "perfect freedom" … It is my complete freedom [to carry out the epoché]”
Ideas II (1918): attitude = direction of interest or thematization
Scheler (1912): “If after the phenomenological reduction has been undertaken, facts and connections between them still remain, we
have proof that … the facts are ‘pure’ facts … If facts and their interconnections do not remain, … the constitution of our picture of the world is
relative to the sense-functions”
Reduction: Evolution
Greg Yudin
Reflexivity at the crossroads
Reduction and humanity
“Only when the spirit returns from its naive external orientation to itself, and remains with itself and purely with itself, can it be sufficient
unto itself” (Husserl 1935)
“Animal lives fully in the concrete and in the reality … To be a human being means to cast a strong ‘no’ to this kind of reality … This is what
Husserl has in mind when he relates the cognition of ideas with ‘phenomenological
reduction’” (Scheler 1928)
Reduction: Evolution-2
Greg Yudin
Reflexivity at the crossroads
1. Reflexive sociology: non-panoptical objectivity
2. “By forcing one to discover externality at the heart of internality, banality in the illusion of
rarity, the common in the pursuit of the unique, sociology does more than de-nounce all the impostures of egoistic
narcissism; it offers perhaps the only means of con-tributing, if only through awareness
of determinations, to the construction, otherwise abandoned to the forces of the
world, of something like a subject” (Bourdieu 1973)
Conclusions
Greg Yudin
Reflexivity at the crossroads
3. Epistemology is the study of doxa (and sociology, too)
4. Break with doxa as an existential challenge
5. True sociological explanation should be able not only to overcome the beliefs about the
object that the subject held before the research, but also to account for these beliefs.
6. Phenomenology of phenomenology
More conclusions