Higher School of Economics,Moscow

Philosophy of Social Science

Roundtable

Ecole Normale

Supérieure20.03.2011

Greg Yudin

Reflexivity at the crossroads:

Form reflexive objectification to reflexive subjectification

Greg Yudin

Reflexivity at the crossroads

Pierre Bourdieu

1930 2002

Greg Yudin

Reflexivity at the crossroads

1. What is new about reflexive sociology from an epistemological point of view?

2. Does reflexive sociology live up to the expectations?

3. What is implied by ‘epistemology’?

4. Phenomenological roots of ‘reflection’

5. Reflexive sociology: useful if correctly understood. Implications

Outline of the talk

Greg Yudin

Reflexivity at the crossroads

Bringing epistemology to existence

Reflexive sociology

Between objectivism and subjectivism:

“taking the things of logic for the logic of things” vs. ‘synoptic illusion’

“Social world constructs its own representation, by using sociology and the sociologist for

this purpose” (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992)

Pierre Bourdieu’s Epistemology

Greg Yudin

Reflexivity at the crossroads

Weber: Wertfreiheit

Mannheim: freischwebende Intelligenz

Merton: scientific ethos

Social determination in epistemology

Away from determination

Greg Yudin

Reflexivity at the crossroads

Sociology of sociology

“uses the knowledge it gains of the social determinations that may bear upon [so-ciology], and particularly the scientific

analysis of all the constraints and all the limitations associated with the fact of

occupying a definite position in a definite field at a particular moment and with a

certain trajectory, in an attempt to locate and neutralize their effects” (Bourdieu &

Wacquant 1992).

Social determination in epistemology-2

Greg Yudin

Reflexivity at the crossroads

Wertfreiheit:

corrects all distortions

The promise of reflexive sociology

Sensitivity to historical challenges:

doesn’t take sociological observer away from his milieu

Greg Yudin

Reflexivity at the crossroads

“The intellectual has the privilege of being placed in conditions that enable him to

strive to understand his generic and specific conditions. In so doing, he can

hope to free himself (in part at least) and to offer others the means of liberation...

The sociologist’s privilege, if he has one, is not that of trying to remain suspended

above those whom he classifies, but that of knowing he is classified and knowing

roughly where he stands in the classifications” (Bourdieu 1993)

The promise of reflexive sociology-2

Greg Yudin

Reflexivity at the crossroads

Criticism of sociology of knowledge

Extra-social viewpoint?

“The failure of Bourdieu's theory is instructive, because it clearly shows why no more reflexivity can ever be granted to theorists than is already granted by such a theory to agents themselves”

(Bohman 1997)

Vicious circle (Pels 2003)

‘Radical reflexivity’ is devastating and self-destructive (Lynch 2000)

Objections

Greg Yudin

Reflexivity at the crossroads

Reflexive sociology fails to rise above partiality

No way past determinations causing biases

No road to consensus among subjects

No access to an impartial view

No panoptical objectivity

Panoptical objectivity

Greg Yudin

Reflexivity at the crossroads

“epistemology differs from abstract methodology inasmuch as it strives to

grasp the logic of error in order to construct the logic of discovery of truth as

a polemic against error and as an endeavor to subject the approximated

truths of science and the methods it uses to methodical, permanent rectification”

(Bourdieu et al. 1991 [1968])

Epistemology?

Greg Yudin

Reflexivity at the crossroads

“Scientific experience is an experience that contradicts common experience”

(Bachelard 1938).

Epistemological obstacles

Doxa vs. episteme

Episteme: 1) objectifies doxa

2) overcomes doxa

Bachelard’s Epistemology

Greg Yudin

Reflexivity at the crossroads

1) those produced by a particular position an agent occupies in the field

2) those related to collective unconscious of the particular field under scrutiny

3) those related to academic field, skholè

(Bourdieu 2000)

Epistemological rupture: • discontinuity of cognition

• existential dimension

Presuppositions of common experience

Greg Yudin

Reflexivity at the crossroads

Primary, pre-predicative and pre-reflexive experience

Already there

“True being is everywhere an ideal goal, a task of episteme or "reason," as opposed to

being which through doxa is merely thought to be, unquestioned and "obvious." (Husserl 1970 [1936]).

Doxa in Husserl

Greg Yudin

Reflexivity at the crossroads

Science is ‘grounded’ in doxa

“Out of the undetermined universal form of the life-world, space and time, and the

manifold of empirical intuitable shapes that can be imagined into it, it made for the first time an objective world in the true sense—

i.e., an infinite totality of ideal objects which are determinable univocally,

methodically, and quite universally for everyone” (Husserl 1970[1936])

No room for subjectivity

Science & doxa

Greg Yudin

Reflexivity at the crossroads

Method of phenomenology

From naïve-natural attitude to reflexive attitude

Epoché (temporary suspension)

Overcoming and objectifying doxa

Back to subjectivity

Phenomenological reduction

Greg Yudin

Reflexivity at the crossroads

1) objectification is subjectification

(Humean problem: ‘how is this most radical subjectivism, which subjectivizes the world

itself, comprehensible’ (Husserl 1970[1936])

2) subjectification means overcoming

Phenomenological reduction-2

Greg Yudin

Reflexivity at the crossroads

Ideas I (1913): “The unrestricted doubt is within the realm of our "perfect freedom" … It is my complete freedom [to carry out the epoché]”

Ideas II (1918): attitude = direction of interest or thematization

Scheler (1912): “If after the phenomenological reduction has been undertaken, facts and connections between them still remain, we

have proof that … the facts are ‘pure’ facts … If facts and their interconnections do not remain, … the constitution of our picture of the world is

relative to the sense-functions”

Reduction: Evolution

Greg Yudin

Reflexivity at the crossroads

Reduction and humanity

“Only when the spirit returns from its naive external orientation to itself, and remains with itself and purely with itself, can it be sufficient

unto itself” (Husserl 1935)

“Animal lives fully in the concrete and in the reality … To be a human being means to cast a strong ‘no’ to this kind of reality … This is what

Husserl has in mind when he relates the cognition of ideas with ‘phenomenological

reduction’” (Scheler 1928)

Reduction: Evolution-2

Greg Yudin

Reflexivity at the crossroads

1. Reflexive sociology: non-panoptical objectivity

2. “By forcing one to discover externality at the heart of internality, banality in the illusion of

rarity, the common in the pursuit of the unique, sociology does more than de-nounce all the impostures of egoistic

narcissism; it offers perhaps the only means of con-tributing, if only through awareness

of determinations, to the construction, otherwise abandoned to the forces of the

world, of something like a subject” (Bourdieu 1973)

Conclusions

Greg Yudin

Reflexivity at the crossroads

3. Epistemology is the study of doxa (and sociology, too)

4. Break with doxa as an existential challenge

5. True sociological explanation should be able not only to overcome the beliefs about the

object that the subject held before the research, but also to account for these beliefs.

6. Phenomenology of phenomenology

More conclusions