New Philosophical Perspectives on Scientific Progress by Yafeng Shan;

Author:Yafeng Shan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

2. Local Knowledge and Understanding: The Qualitative Tradition

Quantitative sociology depends on local knowledge. But what is local knowledge, and how does it relate to sociology as a knowledge producing system, and in what sense does it progress? Much could be said about this, but the key feature is that it is ‘local’, in the sense that it differs from other settings, which makes the difference a problem or puzzle to account for, and that it is knowledge, in the extended sense of the term that includes the practices that underlie the beliefs, attitudes, experiences, and intentions that arise within a given setting.

Mary Morgan and Albert Hirschman have recently described this situation of comparison between local settings in a discussion of case studies, the ‘method’ for this kind of sociology, usually labelled ‘ethnographic’ or qualitative, and associated with the ‘method’ of participant observation:

Easy comparison is not there for the taking in case study work, because what is found in the field of study are not simply facts, observations or phenomena, let alone ready-made descriptions of phenomena awaiting the social scientist’s re-description, but something much less obvious. Clifford Geertz, as anthropologist, described the problem thus: the field presents the social researcher with a knot of puzzles:

a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render (Geertz 1973, 10).

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