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Social Science as Reading and Performance

A Cultural-Sociological Understanding of Epistemology

UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER, USA, isaac.reed{at}colorado.edu

Jeffrey Alexander

YALE UNIVERSITY, USA, jeffrey.alexander{at}yale.edu

In the age of the `return to the empirical' in which the theoretical disputes of an earlier era seem to have fallen silent, we seek to excavate the intellectual conditions for reviving theoretical debate, for it is upon this recovery that deeper understanding of the nature and purpose of empirical social science depends. We argue against the all too frequent turn to ontology, whereby critical realists have sought an epistemological guarantor of sociological validity. We seek, to the contrary, to crystallize a culturally-based, hermeneutic account of a rational social science. Derived from disputes within the sociology of culture, on the one hand, and the long-standing concerns of interpretive philosophy, on the other, we offer a cultural-sociological approach to epistemology. We view the production of truth in social science as a reading of a meaningful social world, and as a performance of truth-claims that is constrained by evidence, but whose success depends on other contextual factors. We conclude that the rationality of social science can be achieved only by forgoing ontology. Theories are abstractions of investigators' meanings that allow the interpretation of social meanings in turn, whether those are actions, relations, or structures. Successful explanations are those that intertwine these meaning structures of investigators and actors in an effective way.

Key Words: culture • epistemology • interpretation • performance • theory

European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 12, No. 1, 21-41 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1368431008099648


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