Norbert Elias and Modern Sociology by Dunning Eric.;Hughes Jason.; & Eric Dunning & Jason Hughes

Norbert Elias and Modern Sociology by Dunning Eric.;Hughes Jason.; & Eric Dunning & Jason Hughes

Author:Dunning, Eric.;Hughes, Jason.; & Eric Dunning & Jason Hughes [Dunning Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780933399
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2019-11-23T16:00:00+00:00


Knowledge and the sciences

Before commencing a discussion of what Elias understood when referring to a ‘more scientific’ sociology, it is necessary to consider what he had to say about the concept of ‘science’ itself. It is also necessary to examine some of his key ideas about the history and philosophy of science. The first thing worthy of note in this connection is the fact that, for Elias, it is highly problematic to talk of ‘science’ as though the term refers to something monolithic. Indeed, he suggested, a sociological theory of science needs to take centrally into account the diversification of ‘the sciences’ which has taken place since the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century (1972: 117; Elias 2009a: 67). Elias was critical of a prevailing tendency in philosophical and philosophically-influenced sociological discussions of science to treat the fund of knowledge of a science at any given time as constituting a coherent and self-contained system that is understandable without reference to the processes by which it ‘came to be’. More particularly, he was critical of the tendency to divorce systems of knowledge from ‘their’ development. He was critical, furthermore, of accounts of sciences in which their histories are introduced as a kind of ‘backdrop’, where such a ‘history’ serves merely as a brief ‘introduction’ which recounts a medley of ideas, seemingly without order or structure. For Elias, once again, what we call ‘science’ has to be understood developmentally, that is as involving structured and directional change. In fact, in this sense it is better from a process-orientated perspective to posit ‘science’ as consisting of ‘structured and directional change’, rather than as a system of knowledge that somehow happens to be contextualised by such developments. Furthermore, Elias suggested, any philosophical, historical or, for that matter, sociological approach to understanding the sciences needs some kind of theory of the ‘development’/‘growth’ and ‘loss’/‘decay’ of scientific knowledge. Indeed, it is not always recognised in this connection that, as we suggested earlier, he wrote of ‘knowledge-loss’ as well as ‘knowledge-gain’ (1987a).

It is, of course, impossible meaningfully to generalise in any simple sense about either philosophical accounts of science or historical ones. In fact, Elias found a measure of agreement between his own views and those of developmentally-minded philosophers of science such as Imre Lakatos and theoretically-minded historians of science such as Thomas Kuhn (Elias 1972).51 In a paper devoted to their contributions, Elias wrote:

[I]f Kuhn argues – and I would agree with him – that a theory of the history of science has to prove itself and may have to be changed in the light of relevant empirical evidence, Lakatos appears to argue – and again, that is how I see it myself – that the evidence may have to be changed, that it, may have to be selected, connected and interpreted differently in accordance with a different theory of the history or the ‘progress’ of science. (1972: 121; 2009a: 89–90)



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