Abstract
This article uses participant objectivation in sociology and philosophy as two knowledge fields to provide a reflexive comparison of their synced field effect in historical circumstances. Drawing on the philosopher and historian of science Gaston Bachelard, I theorize fielded knowledge as a social relation that combines the prior presence of folk knowledge with a socioanalytic exchange between field and folk that includes positions of either defense, replacement or critique. A comparison of post-Wittgenstein Anglophone philosophy and post-sixties American sociology describes their mutual confrontation with folk psychology as an “epistemological obstacle” that generates a remarkable concern with action as a position-taking on the folk relation. A reflexive objectivation of folk knowledge is therefore necessary for a revised understanding of action that correlates with the distinction of sociology’s knowledge capital and how it fares as an explanatory resource in competitive circumstances. The article concludes by leveraging the synced field effect even further to make a recommendation that sociologists can increase the distinction of their knowledge capital by producing discourse that can recognize, legitimate and officialize experiences that otherwise remain obscure, nameless or impossible within the bounded universe of folk psychology.
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Notes
Although Bachelard’s own examples come mainly from physics and chemistry, sociology is particularly sensitive to the tendentious issues surrounding epistemological obstacles. Durkheim (1982[1893]: 38-39) recognized that sociology did (and should) deviate from “prenotions” and commonsense familiarity. However, with less “accumulated knowledge capital” than physics or chemistry (or philosophy), sociology is more vulnerable to criticisms from heteronomous publics who are also involved in the “struggle over the legitimate view of the social world” with no other disciplinary parallel (Bourdieu 2001: 88). Among the extra-disciplinary criticisms that are particularly salient for sociology is the claim that its research does not comply with common sense or that it complies too much with common sense (see Boudon 1988).
The suggestion here is that confrontation with a folk action obstacle occurs in post-Wittgenstein Anglophone philosophy and post-sixties American sociology as two key instances, which is not to omit others. In post-behaviorist American psychology, for example, the work of Daniel Wegner (starting in the mid-1970s) demonstrates another confrontation with folk action, most notably leading to conclusions like “people experience conscious will when they interpret their own thought as the cause of their action” though it does not precede the action (Wegner 2003).
“Epistemological obstacle” still has a live presence in the pedagogical literature, especially in mathematics (Schneider 2014).
Bachelard’s argument here has strong parallels with the genetic epistemology of the psychologist (and Bachelard’s contemporary) Jean Piaget (1970), for whom knowledge was also social, practical and grounded in action, and never individualistic or purely cognitive in a representational-symbolic sense.
Bachelard also recommends a pedagogy based on the creeping familiarity of both folk and fielded knowledge in the scientific unconscious. He argues for the need to balance what he calls a “teacherly soul” that transmits certainties and is “proud of its dogmatism” with a “soul desperate to abstract and reach the quintessential,” which involves “a suffering scientific consciousness … constantly disturbed by the objections of reason, time and again casting doubt on the right to make a particular abstraction yet very sure that abstraction is a duty” (Bachelard 2002[1938]: 31).
Bruner’s arguments on folk psychology have been largely eclipsed by the rapid advance of developmental psychology and arguments about “theory of mind” as part of a psychological-developmental process that normally results in an “understanding of other minds” (Baron-Cohen, Tager-Flusberg and Lombardo 2013). According to this argument, something like folk psychology generally develops at about age 4 when children acquire a theory of mind and start to apply “belief” and other propositional attitude concepts to themselves and others. However, this naturalization of folk psychology rests on shaky grounds, namely its cognitive assumptions, because it hinges on an evolutionary genealogy and problematic inferences about prior function among humans’ evolutionary relatives as the generative source of folk psychology (qua theory of mind). Bruner’s argument, by comparison, becomes more convincing because it proposes a more modest historical genealogy: folk psychology is cultural, in other words, as a “learned narrative practice” (see Hutto 2008: chap 11).
As Fodor continues, “… if we’re wrong about the mind, then that’s the wrongest we’ve ever been about anything. The collapse of the supernatural, for example, didn’t compare; theism never came close to being as intimately involved in our thought and our practice—especially our practice—as belief/desire explanation is. Nothing except, perhaps, our commonsense physics—our intuitive commitment to a world of observer-independent, middle-sized objects—comes as near our cognitive core as intentional explanation does. We’ll be in deep, deep trouble if we have to give it up” (1987: xii). This kind of response is not unfamiliar to “symbolic revolutions” that involve the “objectivation of implicit schemata of thought and action [that] constitutes an attack against the very structures of consciousness” and provoke a defensive response rooted in the defense of “something like … mental integrity” (Bourdieu 1996: 5–6).
Cooley’s “sympathy” argument is arguably the most prominent of these: “a person can be real to us only in the degree to which we imagine an inner life which exists in us … and which we refer to him” (1902: 60). This concern with action among those who would pass through or be key influences on the University of Chicago as an early site of American sociology had a connection with the kind of inductive theorizing cultivated by the university’s department of sociology (see Camic 1995: 1014–15).
Prior discussion of “folk science” ranges from folk biology (Ingaki and Hatano 2002) to folk physics (Proffitt 1999), to folk chemistry (Au 1994) to folk cosmology (Siegal et al. 2004). Swedberg’s (2018) recent analysis of folk economics in Trump’s 2016 election demonstrates the significance of folk science for broader concerns across a range of sociological subfields.
There is a close parallel between Bachelard and Alfred Schutz (1953) on these points, in particular Schutz’s claim that the “scientific constructs are designed to supersede the constructs of common-sense thought … constructs of the second degree” (Schutz 1953: 3). The difference is that Schutz makes this relation between field and folk contingent on “subjective interpretation,” which in Schutz’s view (following Husserl) defines first-person experience categorically (3). For Bachelard, this would commit Schutz to a kind of Cartesian “inability to doubt,” by identifying something that could never be made an epistemological obstacle that will invariably serve as a foundation and will therefore do more to generate knowledge than anything else. The reverse track is to find nothing foundational and generate knowledge only in retrospect instead, that is, from a formative relation to “previous knowledge” that gives it a revised status (Bachelard 2002[1938]: 24). Neither Bachelard’s nor Schutz’s claims are merely epistemological statements, then: they are both “practical techniques” (phénoménotechnique). For Schutz, “subjective interpretation” could never be previous knowledge; the propositions made on this basis could not be made less “epistemologically valuable.’ This likely reflects phenomenology itself as initially a defensive position-taking in a philosophical field against an empirical psychology.
Two prominent exceptions would be Foucault (1973[1966]) and Althusser (2008[1965]) who both offer human-scientific cases that feature epistemological break (e.g. between epistemes and between the young and old Marx). Both are shortsighted in different ways, however, because they tend to link break or obstacle in human science with anti-humanism. This is unnecessary, in part, because any mid-level social ordering, like fielded knowledge, does not predetermine the kind of knowledge claims that will be made vis-à-vis an epistemological obstacle (which in Foucault’s case is often read as a structuralist determinism in which breaks automatically occur somehow), and also because (at least in Althusser’s case) there is not a necessary association between realism (or truth) and breaking with an obstacle, i.e. the claim that Marx broke with his youthful humanism because of “[his] discovery of real reality beyond ideology” (81). The first problem involves a how question, the second involves a why question about obstacles and breaks.
A Google N-gram of the “philosophy of action” searching English-language texts between 1930 and 2018 demonstrates a clear bell-shaped trend that closely matches Bernstein’s periodization of Anglophone philosophical interest in action. It has almost no presence prior to the mid-1950s. It reaches a peak in the late 1960s before declining across the 1970s and 1980s, though maintaining a persistent presence ever since.
The Vienna Circle that helped launch the analytic tradition was a small invisible college that met regularly in Vienna from 1924 to 1936 and included physicists, mathematicians, and other “outsiders to philosophy” among its ranks. Otto Neurath, a sociologist, was a leading member. Many of its members would later come to the United States as emigres from Nazism.
A depiction of this intellectual self-concept, as Monk (1991: 19ff) and Janik and Toulmin (1973: 176–77) both suggest, is found in Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character (1903). Effectively a convoluted screed justifying Weininger’s misogyny and anti-Semitism, it became a public sensation in Vienna after the author’s dramatic suicide in Beethoven’s old house. The book recommended the fateful option—genius or suicide—and included the almost programmatic statement: “Genius is the highest morality and, therefore, it is everyone’s duty.”
It was in this context that the Oxford philosopher J.L. Austin (1962: 3-4) defined the “scholastic view” as a preoccupation with designating all possible meanings of an ordinary word rather than relying on its ordinary use.
Gilbert Ryle at Oxford, a contemporary and sometime rival of Wittgenstein, proposed that relevant differences in philosophy are not really between different schools of thought (or “isms”) but more importantly between “philosophers and non-philosophers” (Ryle 1945: 158), putting emphasis on a cognitive field boundary. Ryle famously proposed a different type of philosophical practice, one that directly engages with folk meanings (e.g. “ordinary language”).
Rorty (1979: 70ff) later replicates Sellars’ Myth using the case of the mythical Antipodeans who understood themselves relative to their brain structure instead. This demonstrates what would happen if neurology and biochemistry had been the first disciplines in which “breakthroughs had been achieved” vis-a-vis the given rather than Jones’ proto-Cartesian philosophy.
When he published “Actions, Reasons and Causes” in 1963, Davidson was in his mid-forties, had been trained mainly in classics not philosophy and, with the exception of some co-authored articles on the formal aspects of decision theory, was largely unpublished to that point. His situation exemplified the growing autonomy of the philosophical field at this time, as an extension of the mass university expansion of the postwar and Cold War periods (Isaac 2013). Sellars himself also exemplifies the unique condition of the philosophical field. His ambition suggests the vacuum in the field left, at least in part, by the waning influence of logical positivists, including members of the Vienna Circle. While Sellars had name recognition in the field (his father being the prolific Roy Wood Sellars), he lacked a PhD in philosophy and was eclectic in his publishing early in his career. His main contributions came in the form of co-editing collected volumes (Readings in Philosophical Analysis, Readings in Ethical Theory). As he wrote about his own writing during the influential mid- to late-1950s period: “I soon discovered that spinning out, as I was, ideas in a vacuum, everything I wrote was idiosyncratic and had little direct connection with what others had said. Each spinning required a new web to support it” (Sellars 1975: 292).
I thank Berislav Marušić for this insight.
According to Dennett, something is an intentional system “only in relation to the strategies of someone who is trying to explain and predict behavior” by ascribing to the system “beliefs and desires (hopes, fears, intentions, hunches …)” (Dennett 1971: 87). A different relation involves the “design stance” and the “physical stance.” All of these are “relatively uncluttered and unmetaphysical, [abstracted] from questions of the composition, constitution, consciousness, morality, or divinity of the entities falling under [them]” (100). The suggestion, then, is that the intentional stance just so happens to be an effective strategy for explaining humans, the design stance for explaining computers, and the physical stance for explaining the heart. Though in principle different stances can, and are, taken, Dennett maintains this position-taking, stated and restated in memorable phraseology: folk psychology is an “intuition pump” about intentional systems like humans (“to a remarkably good first approximation”); it need not refer to anything “sub-personally” and still be good at this (Dennett 2013: 73ff).
At least since Rubinstein’s (1977) late-Wittgensteinian critique of social action, Winch’s own engagement with social science also prompted by Wittgenstein (Winch 1956), and the Edinburgh Science Studies Unit’s adoption of Wittgenstein as a major intellectual precursor (Bloor 1983), Wittgenstein has held a remarkable pride of place for various conversations in sociology, which must include Geertz’s (1973) many appropriations. In fact, from Bloor’s (1983: 183) point of view, the late Wittgenstein also sought to “end philosophy,” not by dissolving it into language but into “the sociology of knowledge.”
Such connections between philosophy and sociology are, in a general sense, not unusual (see Durkheim 1984[1893]: 364); though arguably the deference given to philosophers by sociologists in the contemporary American field is unique in some comparative perspective. In pre- and post-1968 France, for instance, the direction of influence had more the characteristic of a pendulum: for a time, from social science to philosophy, then back again, explicitly in competition (Bourdieu and Passeron 1967). Jacques Derrida, to take one prominent example, made his reputation as a philosopher in France only by engaging with Levi-Strauss, who had successfully rehabilitated a Durkheimian social science against Sartre’s post-war existentialism. This reactive interfield relation generated the “postmodern” as a transatlantic importation, alongside Derrida himself, though not in philosophy (Lamont 1987).
I refer to “sixties” instead of 1960s to convey the trope and not the decade, to capture event-like shifts that very loosely correspond to the decade (see Marwick 1998: chap 1), though not to imply a post-hoc declaration either pro or con: the “sixties” as a narrative starting point for political reasons (Townsley 2002; see also Agar 2008; Jameson 1984).
This is suggested by volumes like Sociology Today: Problems and Prospects (1959; edited Merton, Bloom and Cottrell), which declared sociology’s status as “the generalized social science” (13), Sociology: The Progress of a Decade (1961; edited by Lipset and Smelser), and The Uses of Sociology (1967; edited by Lazarsfeld, Sewell and Wilensky), which was organized around the theme of the 1962 ASA conference and featured claims like the public relates to sociology as “clients” of the discipline (x).
The historiography on each report emphasizes how exemplary they were by the science ideal standards at the time and how, in the reception, that provoked controversy: “the public release of the Moynihan Report sparked a political and an intellectual crisis for … liberal social scientific poverty research,” even though the report “was not distinctive for its findings, which simply ‘reflected what we saw as a consensus among social scientists writing in that generation,’ … Even such attention grabbing-language as the ‘tangle of pathology’ was borrowed from existing scholarly reports” (O’Conner 2001: 204). “To many antiracist social scientists worried about the Moynihan Report, Coleman’s approach was troubling. While Coleman treated the broad context of housing and employment segregation shaping the nation’s increasingly segregated urban cores as an unfortunate but unavoidable part of the urban landscape, the most salient background factors shaping achievement gaps, the Coleman Report held, were those typically appealed to in deficiency paradigms: ‘poverty, community attitudes, and low educational level of parents.’ Even social scientists … questioned the ways the Coleman Report leaned towards blaming the victim” (Gordon 2017).
Another contextual example is Gouldner’s (1968) challenge to Becker (1967) on Becker’s answer to the question “Whose side are we on?” that sociologists “take a side based on their personal and political commitments [and] use our theoretical and technical resources to avoid the distortions that might introduce into our work” (Becker 1967: 247). Gouldner would dispute this as “partisanship unable to transcend the immediacies of narrowly conceived political commitment … another form of market research” that still fit the agenda of the liberal welfare state just in a different way: a “sociology of young men with friends in Washington.” Gouldner instead favored a commitment to “values, not to factions” which he understood as retaining a field-specific “objectivity” by still attempting to speak for a “greater unity” that contained all points of view and affected all of them. By not accounting for this, by going too deferential toward non-fielded points of view, in other words, Gouldner argued that “partisan sociology” tacitly made the “liberal assumption that the policies of this bureaucracy equitably embody the diverse interests of the larger public” and thus could declare social problems to be social but only help individuals in order to solve them (1968: 116).
Smith famously characterized the significance of this as follows: “The women’s movement has given us a sense of our right to have women’s interests represented in sociology, rather than just receiving as authoritative the interests traditionally represented in a sociology put together by men” (1974: 7).
For Agar (2008) the sixties threw experts into prominent public display alongside the appearance of social movements that sparked political contest on the basis of knowledge. The combination would give rise to “studies” disciplines on university campuses, including black studies, women’s and gender studies and science and technology studies (see also Rojas 2007). Jameson (1984: 186), meanwhile, describes the resistance to social-scientific attempts at a “single fundamental experience,” epitomized by behavioral science and structuralism, that erupted in the sixties.
Glaeser and Strauss (1967), for instance, draw attention to the sociological “consultation” to evoke an entirely different model of this relation: “Grounded formal theory, like substantive theory, earns the trust of laymen and sociologists alike. Both consultant and consultee must have this trust in order to work together … Seldom is a general theorist (if you can find one) called in for consultation by other sociologists, laymen, organizations or governments. Most consultants are well known for their research and everyday experience in a particular area … The transferability of formal theories to diverse substantive areas is seldom done in sociological consultation because most formal theories are ungrounded, and therefore not trusted by either sociologists or laymen when they face ‘real life circumstances’” (1967: 98–99).
Consider, for instance, Glaeser and Strauss’ (1967: 98-99) appeal to “everyday” or “real life experience” as being inaccessible to formal theory, “ungrounded” because it lacks an experiential link. For Garfinkel (1967: 270), the “problem of rationality for the sociological theorist” is partly resolved by “deciding on the ground of the examination of experience rather than by an election of theory which of the behavioral designata go together.” For Smith (1974: 11), “the sociologists’ investigation of our directly experienced world as a problem is a mode of discovery or rediscovering the society from within.” Collins (1990: 23ff) later places unique emphasis on “the connection between experience and consciousness” as inextricable from distinct standpoints.
Radical reflexivity, from ethnomethodology’s point of view, is a proposal about the symmetry of field-specific constructs themselves, that they are not different in their task from other organized activities that give the experience of social order (Garfinkel 1967: 31–34, 96–103).
In addition to those mentioned below, consider the following prominent examples: Sewell (1992: 8) revises Giddens’ structuration effort in the NTM by replacing “rules” with “schemas.” However, it is not clear “where Sewell gets schema” (see Stoltz 2018). What is clear is that, by any definition, schema is a thickly cognitive term. Alexander (1992), meanwhile, problematizes the category of “agency” by arguing for a greater focus on actors and invites attention to the “internal environment of actors.” Alexander develops this point by educing a thickly cognitive process (e.g. “representation”): “agency is inherently connected to representational and symbolic capacity … Because actors have agency, they can exercise their representational capacities, re-presenting their internal environments through what is called externalization” (1992: 10). Finally, Hedstrom and Swedberg (1998), in making their case for theorizing “general social mechanisms,” concentrate on three—“the self-fulfilling prophecy (Robert Merton), network diffusion (James Coleman), and threshold-based behavior (Mark Granovetter)—which they argue all exemplify “the same basic belief-formation mechanism” (18) This means that while these arguments are each very different, they all concern “the way in which individuals’ beliefs are being formed” (20). Similar to Sewell and Alexander, this effort makes an attribution of mind in order to resolve an NTM problematic of agency/structure or micro/macro; “belief-formation” implies a series of cognitive commitments.
It bears mentioning that this relation between the two fields finds a precedent a generation earlier through mediations attempted by prominent figures like Anthony Giddens and Clifford Geertz. Giddens (1979: 53), for instance, makes action philosophical in order to (re)make it as a post-sixties sociological object; Geertz (1973: 12) does something similar with cultural meaning. Significantly, their mediations prove to be “vanishing” rather than persistent because while the transfer can be known, its effect (as philosophical) mostly remains unknown. Giddens appropriates Davidson’s 1963 position-taking even while he critiques it. There is a definite authorization from Davidson to Giddens, allowing the latter to theorize a “knowledgeable actor.” Geertz (2001: xvi), meanwhile, remains consistent in his direct appropriations from the late Wittgenstein. The significance of the transfer he performs effectively vanishes as the philosophical lineage becomes secondary and its transferred effect (e.g. “webs of significance”) becomes primary.
Watts’ claim here also resembles Chris Anderson’s (the former editor in chief of Wired) argument in his provocatively titled essay “The End of Theory” (2008): “Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves …. This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology.”
This should not neglect a still different defense argument that transfers Davidson’s position-taking on folk action into a defense of personalism, which translates into the sociological field, with its post-sixties objectified history, as an effort to avoid “de-agentified” social theory (Porpora 2015: 129ff).
Coleman argues that “sociology, in its research and its development of theory, exists on the sufferance of society. If society’s support for this research and theory development is to continue, there must be some reciprocation. Some benefits must flow from the discipline to the rest of society” (1996: 349). To ensure this, he advocates a theory of action on its “simplest foundation [as] purposive action” (348).
This is not dissimilar from the dispositional “hybridity” that shapes knowledge in the “peculiar social universe” of think tanks, where the prevailing idiom remains highly folk-compatible, associates being “articulate” with doing “important, serious” work, and participates in only a narrow universe of argument and a far larger universe of what must remain undiscussed (see Medvetz 2012). Journalistic media appears similarly reliant on folk psychology and intentional action, and tends to “evoke the rhetoric of conspiracy” when it becomes revelatory in even a minor sense (see Boltanski 2014: 260–61).
There is a parallel between critique in this form, that finds “epistemic authority,” and the trajectory of post-Bourdieusean French sociology toward “postcritique” (see Boltanski 2008). Critique in the American sociological field would not disagree with what this means. It remains critical because it seeks to find limits: concepts always connected to conditions of application. Likewise, for Boltanski, the conditions of application for concepts (like actors) are “orders of worth,” for Latour (like actants), they are “trials of strength.” This does not negate critique. It simply asks sociologists find conditions of application for their concepts, lest they risk turning into the most “gullible sort of critique” (Latour 2004: 229–30) or run the risk of being received as not epistemologically different than “conspiracy theory” (Boltanski 2014: 238–9). Here the conditions of application are the “cognitive components” of action. I thank the reviewer for drawing my attention to this parallel.
There is a convergence, for example, between social theory and cognitive science around a vocabulary of “practice” or “enactivism” (Engel et al. 2015).
For Turner (2018:214), sociological constructs that rely on folk-psychological schemes should be prefaced by an “as if” qualification as a reminder that they are one form of construction with definite limits, but not the only form. To use his example: claims about “assumptions” affecting an outcome can only claim that it were “as if” assumptions affected the outcome. Assumptions only reference what someone might need to know in order to understand the outcome and are relative to a social relation of explanation (ex post facto). They are a construction, in other words, the conditions of application of which are not the action itself, or its cognitive components, but this social relation.
This would also seem to distinguish a critique position from a pragmatist theory of action (McDonnell et al. 2017; Gross 2009; Whitford 2002; Joas 1996), which appeals to a philosophical precedent but of a very different sort. It matters, in this regard, that the history of American pragmatism draws from empirical arguments about mind, and so arguably has less vulnerability to a “philosophers’ blindness … disguised as timeless, universal self-evidence” (Bourdieu 2000: 29). The terms of action theory still come from the reading of texts designated “philosophy” and a transfer of their capital, and includes concepts with high folk-compatibility arguably ripe for epistemological break (e.g. “problem-solving”). This would make a pragmatist revision of action theory different from attempts at interfield translation from cognitive science, despite many similarities (e.g. “strong practice theory”; Lizardo and Strand 2010).
Consider, in this respect, the controversy surrounding a position like the one that Vaisey takes: the skepticism it seems to raise about trusted methodologies like interviews (Pugh 2013) or whether, through such explicit commitment to cognition, it advocates a pale form of naturalistic reductionism that alters the epistemological value expected of a (post-sixties) sociological claim so much so that it becomes strange and unsatisfying, far too much to ask despite any misgivings about folk psychology.
“Older concepts of social explanation, based not on tracking sentiments and connections but on evaluating the wider context of people’s lives more broadly … risk being cast into shadow by data colonialism’s new social knowledge. How will concepts such as poverty, which in the nineteenth century emerged from sifting many statistical analyses, survive in competition with proxy logic?” (Couldry and Mejias 2019: 148).
Churchland would ultimately take the edge off this early “across the board elimination” of vocabulary that refers to familiar mental states and recommend a strategy that echoes Bachelard: “revisionary materialism” about this vocabulary.
“I” being of rural working class, United States origin, white, male, first-generation college graduate, for whom my current occupation signals a trajectory of upward social mobility, who was a philosophy undergraduate in a post-Wittgenstein Anglophone-centric department, who traversed through a sociology department not marginal but not top-tier for graduate school, who was trained in cultural sociology in both established and non-established forms, and who, dispositionally, tends toward contrarians and contrarianism regardless of the objectified history (in people or things) encountered.
For example, instead of knowing as the folk do by referencing (tacitly or explicitly) beliefs about, it is possible to know as the folk do practically through extraordinary discourse like “belief is habit” (Strand and Lizardo 2015). Belief-based experience can be like “grabbing and missing” (Strand and Lizardo 2017).
The clearest precedent for undermining “the commonsense confidence in one’s ability to know one’s mind” is psychoanalysis and its objectivation of mind as the unconscious operating according to a primary process (of some kind). As Mercier and Sperber put it, “Freud’s challenge to the idea that we know our reasons has been, if anything, expanded” (2017: 114). Yet the wall between psychoanalysis and cognitive science remains large, perhaps unbreachable. Between the psychoanalytic unconscious and the cognitive unconscious lies a difference between “the laboratory” and “the couch” as the controlled condition that produces knowledge about one or the other: an epistemological difference that is a fundamental social difference (see Knorr-Cetina 1992; Krause and Guggenheim 2013). If critique is to maintain an egalitarian relation to the folk, unlike psychoanalysis, the challenge is to not make “the truth of X [lie] in the making of the person into someone who holds X” (Martin 2011: 84–85).
Legal fields, for example, confront a similar line of questioning which, while on the margins to this point, could at least in principle prove destabilizing should a folk action obstacle also become prominent for position-taking in that field: “The law will be fundamentally challenged if neuroscience or any other science can conclusively demonstrate that the law’s psychology is wrong and that we are not the type of creatures for whom mental states are causally effective” (Morse 2015: 262).
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Strand, M. Sociology and philosophy in the United States since the sixties: Death and resurrection of a folk action obstacle. Theor Soc 49, 101–150 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-019-09374-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-019-09374-0