isaac ariail reed
INTERPRETATION AND
SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE
On the Use of Theory in the Human Sciences
the universit y of chicago press
Chicago & London
isaac ariail reed is assistant professor of sociology
at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
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Reed, Isaac (Isaac Ariail)
Interpretation and social knowledge : on the use of theory in
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Includes bibliographical references and index.
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1. Knowledge, Theory of. 2. Knowledge, Sociology of.
3. Social sciences—Philosophy. 4. Social sciences—Methodology.
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Introduction
I
Our understanding of social knowledge is due for a massive transformation.
A generation’s worth of arguments about postmodernism
and science, relativism and objectivism, have obscured our view; a
consistent connection has been drawn between the study of discourse
and the adoption of philosophical skepticism and ironic distance; a
repeated disavowal of the possibility of causal explanation has crippled
the interpretation of cultures; an overwhelming tendency to frame
the problem of social knowledge as the problem of how social science
can be like natural science has eliminated essential questions from our
minds. The space of epistemological argument in social theory, then,
comes to be deﬁned by “posts” and their opponents: postpositivism,
poststructuralism, postmodernism, postcolonialism. Regardless of
what the “posts” actually are or are not, thinking about social knowledge
is, in this Manichean account, a dispute about whether science
(and perhaps modernity) is good or bad.
For the researcher intent on actually producing some sort of social
knowledge, the disputations of social theory and philosophy are often
experienced less directly, sublimated into distorted communiqués
2 introduction
about methodology: qualitative against quantitative; unscheduled
interviews against scheduled interviews; participant observation
against survey research; in a phrase, depth against generality. And so,
metatheoretical arguments about the construction and justiﬁcation
of social knowledge reappear as debates about lived social realities,
and the research design that is necessary to grasp them.
The debates about method are, without a doubt, real: they denote
signiﬁcant divergences in the practice of gathering and colligating
evidence in social research. But in their connotations, they encode
the same paralyzing epistemological dilemma. From one point of
view, there are clearheaded and rigorous producers of quantiﬁable,
veriﬁable truths about social phenomena, and those who, for whatever
reason, prefer to impose their own interpretive ﬂights of fancy on
idiosyncratic data gathered in idiosyncratic ways. From the opposite
point of view, “objectivists” or “positivists” do not work for their
objectivity but rather perform it. The ongoing scientism of large sectors
of the human sciences is, in this latter view, the bane of a true
understanding of social life, which can only be achieved through the
careful humanism of attending to what people actually do, say, think,
and tell their interviewer.1
But perhaps the heavy feeling of despair and déjà vu brought on
by such dilemmas is not necessary. We can reconsider. So let us begin
by asking: are all of our problems, as researchers and as theorists, understandable
in terms of differences in method, practically conceived
as that which we do to establish factual statements, broad or narrow,
1. The term “human sciences” has a historical referent in the intellectual project
of the Geisteswissenschaften, literally “sciences of the spirit,” and thus the nineteenthcentury
German philosophies of history that formed an important part of the intellectual
context for Max Weber’s deﬁnition of sociology. But it is also intended to
evoke more recent arguments about the (sometimes nefarious) effect of disciplinary
self-conceptions on research into how human beings live together in social groups. In
particular, the sociologist Mayer Zald has developed an incisive analysis and critique of
the ways in which the social sciences generally, and sociology in particular, can beneﬁt
from recognizing their historical-intellectual debt to both the humanities and the
natural sciences, and from correcting their overemphasis on the latter as a model for
the construction of knowledge. His open-ended paper invites, in my view, arguments of
the kind found in this book. See Mayer Zald, “Sociology as a Discipline: Quasi-Science
and Quasi-Humanities,” American Sociologist 22, nos. 3–4 (1991). For a historical account
of the conditions that led to the formation of the social scientiﬁc disciplines as
we now know them in the United States, and an argument that this organization of
intellectual labor is no longer appropriate, see Immanuel Wallerstein et al., Open the
Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social
Sciences (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
introduction 3
about social life? Or do disputes over method, when considered carefully,
reveal other problems, problems not reducible to measurement
and technique, problems that point to deep divides in our fundamental
conception of how a community of inquiry can expect to
know something about other human communities and their various
dynamics?2
I am continually left to wonder whether the world of social
researchers is really divisible into those who believe in the existence
of social facts in some quantitative sense and those who do not, or
whether this divide has lost even its heuristic utility. Is it at the level
of facts, in other words, that the great controversies over the nature
and purpose of research in the human sciences should be fought
out? In one sense, yes: before doing anything, we have to ﬁnd a way
to “establish the phenomenon.”3
But in another sense, no: debates
about method often carry implicit disagreements about the nature
and purpose of inquiry, the structure of social life itself, and the role
of the critical intellectual or social researcher in comprehending it. If
we render these disagreements explicit, we ﬁnd that they are not only
about method, strictly understood, but also about how knowledge
claims are built out of conceptual innovation, justiﬁed in publication,
and criticized as inaccurate and untrue (or, to use that infuriatingly
ambiguous word, “problematic”).
We have disagreements, that is, not only about how we establish
the sheer existence of this or that social phenomenon, but also about
how we can claim to correctly and effectively explain, criticize, or
interpret it. In my view it is these latter disagreements, rather than
disagreements about whether or not there are, in some sense, social
facts, that are at the core of controversies about social knowledge.
And so, it is to these disagreements that we must address ourselves if
we are to move beyond the world of posts.
2. Sandra Harding has usefully distinguished between method (“a technique for (or
way of proceeding in) gathering evidence”), methodology (“a theory and analysis of
how research does or should proceed”), and epistemology (“a theory of knowledge”).
The analysis of this book could be said to address the latter two, if we consider that
Harding’s deﬁnition of methodology includes how theory is used and applied in speciﬁc
disciplines and ﬁelds. But there is another way of framing this, which is to say that
evidentiary method must be accompanied by a conceptual method, whereby evidence
is ordered and comprehended as part of a larger knowledge claim. Sandra Harding,
“Is There a Feminist Method?” in Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues, ed.
Sandra G. Harding (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 1–14.
3. Robert K. Merton, “Three Fragments from a Sociologist’s Notebooks: Establishing
the Phenomenon, Speciﬁed Ignorance and Strategic Research Materials,” Annual
Review of Sociology 13 (1987).
4 introduction
II
In the discourses in and around contemporary social theory, postpositivism
has a somewhat clear historical meaning—the term refers
to the break with certain taken-for-granted assumptions about the
unity of the natural and social sciences that, like so many other breaks,
happened sometime in “the sixties.”4
Given the academic penchant
for overdramatizing our own intellectual disputations, it should not
surprise us that this break is narrated in vaguely heroic terms, especially
in casual academic conversation. “Positivist” is used pejoratively
in certain sectors of the human sciences because the positivist is the
antagonist to the heroic protagonist, the postpositivist, who broke
his chains and challenged the dragon. In this frame “positivist” refers
to someone whose addiction to reductive quantiﬁcation causes him
to miss the real stuff of social life—villains, in scholarship, are always
associated with untruth.
But what could positivism mean, in some general and yet practically
signiﬁcant way, if it is not just a pejorative signiﬁer, applied to
work that lacks the sacred values of the researcher who casually uses
the term? Probably postpositivists mean one of two things when
they say “positivist.” First of all, positivism can refer to an underlying
philosophical commitment to certain methods for ascertaining
social facts—descriptive positivism. Here the core positivist axiom
is that the social sciences are rendered scientiﬁc by the use of speciﬁc
methodological techniques for handling data, and in particular by an
agreement about the superiority of certain ways of establishing reliability
and validity through quantiﬁcation and statistical inference.
In the context of contemporary social research, the most immediate
objection to descriptive positivism is in terms of the methods used to
produce accurate descriptions of social phenomena. Is quantiﬁcation
and, more speciﬁcally, correlational analysis adequate to the task of
producing facts about social life? It is a quite common argument, in
fact, that social research should be empiricist, but that the methods
4. This break is documented and advocated for, in classic form, in Richard J. Bernstein,
The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1976). See also Sherry Ortner, “Theory in Anthropology since the ’60s,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History (1984). For a good analysis of “the sixties”
as it has become a construction relevant to intellectuals in the West more generally,
see Eleanor Townsley, “‘The Sixties’ Trope,” Theory, Culture, and Society 18, no. 6
(2001).
introduction 5
for achieving empirical validity differ signiﬁcantly from those found
in either the natural sciences or the (perhaps misguided) quantitative
branches of social science. For example, one could value the
descriptive production of truth above all else, but insist that this
description must be qualitative and particularistic. Thus the tendency
toward empiricism in social research extends far beyond quantitative
methodologies taken from the natural sciences.5
Positivism, as an
approach to method, and empiricism, as a resistance to theory, are
by no means coextensive. Empiricism can be “antipositivist.” Furthermore,
“positivism” can also refer to a way of building and using
theory to guide research.
In particular, the second meaning of positivism refers to how one
can use theory to construct explanations. Here we ﬁnd the philosophical
arguments of the logical positivists, the various attempts to
put their covering-law model of explanation to work in the human
sciences, and the increasingly sophisticated inheritors of the ambition
to construct a truly universal science of the social. Explanation, in
this view, is the logical result of combining a general law about social
life with particular circumstances, thus enabling the investigator to
predict or retrodict the resultant outcome. What we want, according
to what we could call theoretical positivism, is a social physics, with
theory leading the way by positing general laws of social behavior.6
Should we have a social physics? Can we have a successful one?
5. John Goldthorpe has written that ethnography, in so far as it is not “irrationalist,”
shares many of the epistemological assumptions of survey research. He then argues
for a “common logic of inference” across both qualitative and quantitative research in
social science, and indeed across the social and natural sciences, in John H. Goldthorpe,
“Sociological Ethnography Today: Problems and Prospects,” in On Sociology, Volume 1:
Critique and Program (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). Goldthorpe’s own
vision could hardly be called empiricist, however. Rather, he proposes a compelling
synthesis of rational action theory and the quantitative analysis of data, which would
ﬁt the second meaning of positivism (“theoretical positivism”) I discuss below. For an
analysis, see Isaac Reed, “Review Essay: Social Theory, Post-post-positivism, and the
Question of Interpretation,” International Sociology 23, no. 5 (2008).
6. Jonathan Turner, drawing on the original vision of August Comte, argues that
the goal of social physics “is to uncover abstract laws, and the fewer laws the better,” and
thus that the goal of “science is to seek understanding of the universe, and the vehicle
through which such understanding is to be achieved is theory. Sociology has allowed
poor philosophers to usurp theoretical activity and ‘statistical packages’ to hold social
science hostage.” (Jonathan Turner, “Returning to ‘Social Physics’: Illustrations from
the Work of George Herbert Mead,” Current Perspectives in Social Theory 2 [1981]: 188,
187). For Turner’s classic defense of theoretical positivism in sociology, see Jonathan
Turner, “In Defense of Positivism,” Sociological Theory 3, no. 2 (1985).
6 introduction
Successful or not, we have it: there are, in the contemporary social
sciences, extended and well-articulated attempts to develop a hypergeneralized
approach to social explanation. In theoretical positivism,
then, we ﬁnd highly general hypotheses and propositions that are
to be veriﬁed or falsiﬁed through empirical testing, and, simultaneously,
a strong argument that social research must ﬁnd a way to move
beyond merely producing correlations and instead produce theoryinformed
explanations. Theoretical positivism, in other words, has
deep suspicions about descriptive positivism. Perhaps the goal for
theoretical positivism is a set of social sciences, all of which look like
neoclassical economics, in which the basic assumptions are agreed
upon, and metatheoretical debate about human nature, social structure,
and the problems inherent in the very possibility of knowing
something about either is left to philosophers and the occasional
book on microfoundations.
It must be said: if one wants to understand, on its own terms, the
philosophical underpinnings of positivism, or logical positivism, or
the combination of the quantitative analysis of data with the testing
of universal propositions, the resources are ample. The empiricist
philosophy of science has developed in radically new directions since
Carl Hempel ruled the scene,7
and if one wants to grasp the presuppositions
and conceptual how-to of strictly “objectivist” quantitative
research, myriad books on research design in social science put previous
generations’ manuals to shame. And yet, simultaneously, such
research has been subjected to ongoing, relentless attack for what
is seen as its tendency to distort and reduce human social life—to
sacriﬁce understanding for a form of mathematical precision that is,
in the end, illusory. These arguments are, by now, exceedingly well
known.
Thus this book is not another attack on positivism, either in the
substance of its text or in the goals that it outlines for how we use
theory in research. Rather, it is a reconsideration of two fundamental
7. Consider how Wesley Salmon’s work extending the analytic tradition in the
philosophy of science has moved beyond the logical positivists’ initial aversion to
theorizing causality outside Humean conﬁnes, and thus brought theories of causality
and (neopositivist) theories of scientiﬁc explanation together. Indeed, the entire
conversation between Salmon and his critics reveals how the analytic philosophy of
science has had its own positivist/postpositivist conversation. See Wesley Salmon,
Scientiﬁc Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1984), and Wesley Salmon, Causality and Explanation (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1998).
introduction 7
and interrelated questions: how do, and how should, theory and evidence
interact? For there is much objection, in postpositivism, to the
positivist answer to these questions (in short, that theory generates
hypotheses and evidences tests them), but little agreement as to how
this intersection should happen outside the positivist mold.8
What is
this so-called dialogue between theory and evidence? How are we to
construct and use theory if we are not formulating hypotheses? This
is the curiosity that led to this book: I want to know how nonpositivist
research works, and to build a constructive theory of knowledge
claims made by nonpositivists. To do this, I have constructed a text
that works at the intersection of practice and prescription: in-depth
textual analysis of actual truth claims in social research is combined
with epistemological reﬂection.
I call the different ways of bringing theory and evidence together
“epistemic modes.” The term is intended to indicate the relative autonomy
of these modes from substantive commitments to theoretical
programs, research agendas, or speciﬁc methods. Epistemic modes
dictate the conceptual method by which theory is brought into contact
with evidence, structure the expectations about what such contact can
accomplish, and provide more or less well-formed criteria of validity
that are used to evaluate the knowledge that is thereby produced.
Epistemic modes can also be articulated in abstract argumentation
about the possibilities and limits of social knowledge, and can be
interrogated about their premises. But they do not map neatly onto
substantive research programs, or onto any particular intellectual
history of social theory or any particular account of paradigms of
social research.9
Thus, while the epistemic modes I examine—realist, normative,
and interpretive—have elective afﬁnities with great thinkers and grand
traditions of social analysis (afﬁnities some readers will immediately
recognize, and which I discuss throughout the text and especially
8. Isaac Ariail Reed, “Epistemology Contextualized: Social-Scientiﬁc Knowledge
in a Postpositivist Era,” Sociological Theory 28, no. 1 (2010).
9. There is one work, however, whose mapping of social thought and social research
seems particularly relevant to this text. That is John R. Hall, Cultures of Inquiry:
From Epistemology to Discourse in Sociohistorical Research (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999). Certainly this book is written in a similar interpretive spirit to
Hall’s project and shares some of its arguments, as will become clear. I argue herein,
however, for a return to epistemology. I do not see this as incommensurate with Hall’s
map per se, but rather as a theoretical project for which Hall’s map of sociohistorical
investigation reveals the need, or calls forth.
8 introduction
in the footnotes), their truth and utility as terms for understanding
what is going on when a researcher constructs a knowledge claim
stand or fall with what makes up the core of each chapter in the book:
the analysis of, and reﬂection upon, actual truth claims made in the
human sciences. Here I brieﬂy introduce the three epistemic modes
that I examine.
III
In the realist epistemic mode (chapter 2), theory points to the fundamental
forces and relations of social life that lie beneath the surface
phenomena that we observe, narrate, experience, and/or measure.
Thus when the investigator uses theory, what she does is connect an
underlying social reality to the social phenomena or outcomes that she
desires to explain. The entities referred to by theory give order to her
data and a causal force to her conclusions. Revolutions are explained
by the fundamental processes that bring them about; conversations
and interactions, in which identities are established and dissolved, are
explained by the underlying tendencies of human cognition; moves
in a marriage market are explained in terms of the ways in which individuals
maximize utility; the emergence of a cultural phenomenon,
such as Star Wars, is explained by the way in which it hews to the
fundamental binaries that structure the human mind.
Realism reignites the possibility that social science, post-Kuhn,
is still an embodiment of a generalized scientiﬁc rationality. That
rationality, however, is deﬁned and guaranteed by the way in which
social theory directly references social reality, revealing the social
forces that structure the world. The core conceptual problem of realism,
then, is this: how can the efforts of the experimental scientiﬁc
laboratory be reconﬁgured and transformed for the science of society
and history? The opening text of the contemporary critical realist
intellectual movement, Roy Bhaskar’s A Realist Theory of Science,
begins with a philosophical analysis of what must be true about the
world if natural scientiﬁc experiments are intelligible and rational.10
Bhaskar’s next book, perhaps even more important for that movement,
considers how social science can and cannot imitate the logic of
natural science that he originally derived from the analysis of experi-
10. Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science (New York: Verso, 2008), chap. 1,
esp. 23–26.
introduction 9
ment.11
The problem, of course, is the way humans bring a certain
“concept-dependence” to social reality, which is a nice way of saying
that subjectivity messes everything up. Human subjects, moreover,
have a rather irritating tendency to aspire to ideals, be motivated
by outrageously unrealistic ideas, and pass judgment on each other.
This issue—that human social life is full not only of concepts but of
judgments—is what brings the argument of this book to the second
epistemic mode I consider.
In the normative epistemic mode (chapter 3), theory is what enables
research to be a dialogue between investigator and investigated—
between an ethnographer and her subjects, between a historian and
the lives he recreates, between a critic and the text she reconsiders and
reframes. Theory brings to bear the critical force of well-articulated
utopia upon the empirical world, but in doing so, it brings together
the intellectual’s political philosophies with the utopian capacities
immanent in social life as lived and experienced. In normative social
knowledge, then, two modes of consciousness come to inform each
other, and thus theories of the good get better—while at the same
time striving for some sort of practical effect. The possibilities for
resisting a hegemonic cultural formation are revealed; the nascent
democratic instincts of volunteers are articulated and made sharper;
the deeply pathological implications of a seemingly liberatory set of
cultural practices are brought to light. And thus the conversation
about the good and the should is expanded.
What normative research does is reconﬁgure the terrain of normative
argument by producing interpretations of actual social life. Ideals
for a better social order are salvaged from conversations in coffee
shops, solidaristic town hall meetings, anti-imperial campaigns, and so
on. Visions of dystopia also anchor normative research, sometimes in
the genre of tragic irony: the normative projects of humanist reformers
are revealed to be norming projects in the service of a new format
of domination (for example). But the core conceptual problem, for
normativism, is how this operation of critique, which is grounded in
actuality and fact, can or cannot be grounded in a more explanatorily
powerful use of theory. A town hall meeting identiﬁes a problem, but
how can the solution be tested, if there is no laboratory? Normativism,
in other words, either points back to realism, or toward a different
11. Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary
Human Sciences, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1998).
10 introduction
way to ground truth claims in social research. And it is to discerning
what this “different way” could be that the latter part of this book is
dedicated, in its study of interpretive social knowledge.
In what I call the interpretive epistemic mode (chapter 4), the primary
focus of the investigator is on the arrangements of signiﬁcation
and representation, the layers of social meaning, that shape human
experience. The investigator reconstructs the meaningful context
of social action, and to do so she draws upon a plurality of theoretical
abstractions; these different theoretical tools need not—pace
realism—add up to a coherent, general, and referential theory of
social reality in the abstract. Rather, the investigator combines bits
of theory with bits of evidence, and then these theory-fact pairs are
brought together into a meaningful whole. This meaningful whole is
the deep interpretation that the investigator constructs, and it gives
coherence to her case. Cockﬁghts are reinterpreted as a performance
of status, masculinity, and what it means to be human; a revolution is
analyzed in terms of how the advance guard constructed, and propagated,
a worldview; the actions of a whole cohort of politicians or
scientists is traced back to a formative experience and the narrative
construction of collective identity that emerged from it.
Interpretive social research, I argue, must push beyond the surface
reports of actors and the immediate meanings available in the
investigator’s evidence to grasp some deeper set of meanings that
inhere in the action under study. This is what the use of theory allows
the hermeneutically sensitive researcher to do. But even deep interpretations
are typically constructed—by friends and foes alike—as
interpretations and not explanations. Overcoming this problem is
the core conceptual difﬁculty for the interpretive epistemic mode.
Consider, very brieﬂy, an example.
An interpretivist sets out study the Salem Witch Trials. In his
interpretation, he attempts to grasp the meaningful world of Puritan
life and, in particular, how witches and witchcraft played an
emotionally charged role in the Puritan social imaginary, encoding
a socially powerful metaphysics of God, sex, and patriarchy.12
What
sort of knowledge claim is this interpretation? The point, with Salem
at least, is that this metaphysics was threatened in 1692 by the
possibility of witches meddling with the cosmos, thus turning the
12. Isaac Reed, “Why Salem Made Sense: Gender, Culture, and Puritan Persecution
of Witchcraft,” Cultural Sociology 1, no. 2 (2007): 209–34.
introduction 11
trials into a countrywide crisis, ending in the murder of nineteen
men and women. Who felt threatened by the witches? What did fear
motivate those people to do, and what social processes were they able
to trigger to get done what they were certain needed to be done?
What were the unintended effects of these developments? These are
causal, explanatory questions, and they force us to consider whether
or not, and if so how, interpretations of social meaning can possess
explanatory torque.
In other words, if realism derives from the logic of the lab, and
normativism from the logic of the democratic meeting or social movement,
interpretivism derives from the logic of reading and disputing
different readings of a text,13
which raises the question—reading for
what? How do symbols enter the social world, and have an effect on
social action—an effect, moreover, that the investigator can comprehend
and communicate by building an explanation? The idea of
interpretive explanation is the subject of chapter 5. In it, I continue
my attempt to recast the interpretive way of making social knowledge
claims. Meaning-centered research in the human sciences, I argue,
is not only theory-intensive (chapter 4) but also constructs causal
explanations, albeit in a way that departs from the typical ways of
thinking about social causality. By revealing the way social meanings
act as forming, as opposed to forcing, causes, the interpretive
epistemic mode can offer a synthetic approach to social knowledge,
and enable the researcher to build social explanations and deliver
social critique.
IV
These reconstructions of epistemic modes are intended to be an
intervention in, and a symptom of, what I view as a new epistemological
era for social research—the era after the posts. After debates
about culture, interpretation, and the linguistic turn; after innovative
13. The issue is how much reading a text can be fruitfully compared to analyzing
social action. Ultimately, in chapters 4 and 5, I move toward an image of the interpretive
social researcher as more akin to a theater critic than a reader of texts. However,
the whole question of action and text is one of the key debates of the cultural turn,
which opens up many of the questions that this book attempts to address. The classic
meditation on text and social action is Paul Ricoeur, “The Model of the Text:
Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” Social Research 38 (1971). See also Susan
Hekman, “Action as a Text: Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and the Social Scientiﬁc Analysis
of Action,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 14, no. 3 (1984).
12 introduction
recastings of standpoint theory and the politics of knowledge; after
extended discussions of power/knowledge, interpellation, and subject
production; after all this, what is the producer of social knowledge
to do? Is it possible to believe a great deal of what is written and said
in postpositivist social theory to be true, and yet to proceed with the
goal of explaining social action? I think that it is, and this possibility
is what I intend my account of social knowledge to render visible.
Yet if this book is a symptom of a speciﬁc epistemic moment, and
the product of a certain generational experience—of being trained
in social theory long after the ﬁercest battles over “postmodernism”
had burned bright—its sympathetic engagements and reconstructions
are less aimed at the august history of social theory and philosophy,
and more at the inner workings of texts that have, often
very successfully, attempted to say something about the world—or
at least some small piece of it. For, when social theory is presented
in the form of competing schools, when research programs are assessed
for their fecundity, or when the basic traditions of philosophical
thought about social science are set out, the result is often exigetically
honest but repetitive. It is also bewildering. Not only are there
a plurality of theoretical positions and research programs, but every
such program of necessity involves combinations of methodological
tendencies, theoretical presuppositions, and political implications or
valences—along with answers to the more explicitly epistemological
questions considered here. When one includes, furthermore, the
codiﬁed empirical claims that often belong (or are seen to belong)
to this or that research program, the result is a sprawling catalogue
or encyclopedia of what are, ultimately, different subject positions in
a complex and dynamic discourse.
Training in social theory involves learning how to map this discourse
in useful ways, and to pay close attention to the way in which
theoretical discourses encode their own historical conditions of production.
Yet these maps, as they become their own extended apparatus
of intersecting denotations and connotations, can be exhausting. At
a certain point in my own intellectual biography, I came to view this
exhaustion about mapping the ﬁeld of social theory to be connected
to a different problem—the problem of the metatheoretical frame
within which one makes strong, empirically responsible, theoretically
informed knowledge claims in social research itself. For both myself
and the historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and scholars of communication
I trained with, our metatheoretical frames were much
introduction 13
more precise in their negative aspects. We did not have an integrated
Marxist theoretical structure to contain and connect social explanation,
political judgment, and the interpretation of cultures. We did
not have the calm and settled scientiﬁc frame of variables and their
various effects, or even the frame of a truly general sociological theory
(almost everyone I trained with was, in a rather disturbingly certain
way, a “postpositivist”). We did not have the warrant to simply head
out into the world (or into the archives) to pursue value-free social
research. I interrogated my friends, colleagues, and teachers on the
matter. We all knew for sure what we were not. We were not positivists,
not Marxists, not “reductionists,” and so on and so forth. But
what was the negation of the negation? What were we?
I have come to view this question as essential, and as answerable
only in an epistemological register. That register must resist the twin
temptations of formal logic, permanently distant from the messiness
of social investigation, and the reductive sociology of knowledge,
insensitive to how internal and impersonal imperatives, combined
with informal argumentation and scholarly communication, can
make communities of inquiry more than just clubs or networks.14
A
theory of social knowledge should, instead, be built through critical
reﬂection upon what it is that researchers do when they call on social
theory to help them comprehend their evidence. That, at least, is the
starting point for chapter 1.
14. For the classic criticism of formal logic as distant from the sorts of argument
that carry weight in different areas of inquiry, see Stephen Toulmin, The Uses of Argument
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). For a critique of how strong
programs in the sociology of science, and more broadly the sociology of knowledge,
themselves reify social structure in a contradictory way, see James Bohman, New Philosophy
of Social Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 40 –49.