Sociology of knowledge

Sociology of knowledge is concerned with the creation, dissemination, use and preservation of knowledge and understanding within groups, communities and societies. Fundamental is the hypothesis that knowledge is shaped by the social context through and anchored in it. Knowledge, and more generally: Think, therefore is socially conditioned. Knowledge is not an autonomous process.

The sociology of knowledge is a branch of sociology. It is, inter alia, of cultural sociology close, which also deals with the context of cultural and social phenomena.

The relevant theories have been developed in the early 20th century by Max Scheler and Karl Mannheim.

Precursor

The sociology of knowledge can look back on several precursors. These are largely proto- sociological ( before Marx and Engels ), ie they did not even ask for the social interests that lie behind certain structures of thought, behind a " thinking style " (Karl Mannheim).

• Francis Bacon (1561-1626), who pointed at the center of his doctrine of idols on inhibition of sensory and intellectual functions such as idols, prejudices and errors which cloud the true knowledge.
• Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), of a new philosophy of history in his book, The New Science, in which man constructs his own history and in a social context.
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), which enriches the social construction to the dialectic of consciousness and reality. Simply put, the thoughts can change reality in Hegel. This increases his legal philosophy in a utopia, in which the story is a story of realization of pure rationality or the objective mind, which in turn materializes as a state. The reality for him is therefore not a facticity.
• Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) transformed the ruling Kantian epistemology (especially compared to contemporary positivists ) in recognition of the diversity of the knowledge of reality: the human world, we understand the nature we can explain with laws. Both areas of reality correspond to different methodological attitudes; both represent different sciences: the humanities and the natural sciences. It is crucial that Dilthey in the human, ie, the cultural sphere of a relation of " experience, expression and understanding " went out and thus epistemologically allowed a perspective view of the world.
• Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is a precursor of the sociology of knowledge, so far as he unmasks the interest relativity of ' truth ': Knowledge is power ( Francis Bacon).
• Finally, the historical materialist, designated by them as a science, teaching of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, a direct precursor of classical German sociology of knowledge, in that it starts from the ideological illusory nature of the prevailing style of thought and Hegel's program saying ' presents to his feet ': the being determines consciousness ( The German ideology, MEW 3).

Development

The central concern of classical German sociology of knowledge (Karl Mannheim, Max Scheler, Theodor Geiger, Wilhelm Jerusalem) was in this tradition, especially but. in the immediate successor of Wilhelm Dilthey's justification for the Humanities, the elucidation of the relationship between social being and consciousness through the assignment of " cultural objectification " (a term Dilthey, involving, inter alia, worldviews, values, ways of thinking ) to social structures

In Mannheim concept of ideology gained a wider meaning. Unlike Marx, who linked the concept of ideology with the " false consciousness ", to all thinking, even the "knowledge" to be ideologically, ie subject to social conditionality. He has shown this in detail for the conservative, liberal and socialist thought. Only the " free-floating intelligence" is, according to Mannheim largely outside of ideological thinking and could independently and sensitively interact with social processes.

With this concept of ideology, which posits a total dependence on the point of view of the social being able to put the question of the possibility of science, behind ideology to recognize at all true. Mannheim solved this dilemma with the requirement to connect a non-judgmental setting in addition with an epistemological stance.

Max Scheler in his sociology of knowledge made ​​the distinction between salvation or redemption (1 ) education ( 2) knowledge and performance (3). Each type of knowledge corresponds to a certain, to be examined interested attitude.

In the transformed continuation of the sociological tradition, especially in American sociology, the question of the classical sociology of knowledge by the social conditioning of scientific knowledge and ideologies has been expanded, ie the sociology of knowledge under investigation was broader.

The "newer sociology of knowledge " deals in contrast to the classical sociology of knowledge Scheler and Mannheim with all that is true in a society than knowledge, and especially with the exploration of social knowledge stocks that make up the everyday knowledge of the "everyone", and from which " can be understood, the social construction of reality "(Peter L. Berger, Thomas Luckmann ). There is also the variant of a praxeological sociology of knowledge ( Bohnsack 2007, 2008 ), in the context of the documentary method has been developed which is particularly aimed at the reconstruction of an implicit, atheoretical and habitually anchored Knowledge ( conjunctive knowledge in the sense of Karl Mannheim).

As a place of meaning is in all variants of the sociology of knowledge, the everyday world the object of sociological analysis. Going back to the place by Edmund Husserl concept of the lifeworld Berger and Luckmann developed a concept of the everyday world in which to write the acting subjects their experiences meaning and develop everyday use interpretations, interpretive schemes, logics of action and justification strategies that go into a daily routine of knowledge. The everyday sense area pervades all areas and systems of a society and is thus constitutive of the social reality and every socially relevant knowledge. The sociology of knowledge thus becomes a basic science of sociology.

Notwithstanding this claim is knowledge-sociological analyzes involved in the past 20 years, influenced by symbolic interactionism and phenomenological sociology and ethnomethodology, mostly with micro-sociological issues and the reconstruction of specific and individualized special knowledge stocks. Through the transformation of the modern to the postmodern knowledge and media society, the question of the origin, the relevance and the social legitimation of knowledge stocks took on a new relevance, but has not yet led to a significant restructuring of the sociological paradigm.

Opposite this narrower concept version of " sociology of knowledge " within the meaning of hermeneutic sociology of knowledge ( Soeffner; Hitzler & Reichertz & Schroer, garlic ) or the development of the Mannheim'schen sociology of knowledge in the documentary method can also Michel Foucault's discourse analysis, with its principle of the inseparable connection of 'knowledge' and 'power' regarded as genuine sociology of knowledge ( in the classical sense of Mannheim and Scheler ).

The systems theory of Niklas Luhmann 's sociology of knowledge, namely in the interrelating of a certain " social structure and their semantics ." Luhmann refers here explicitly to Mannheim.

Other branches of sociology of knowledge are also the intellectuals Sociology ( Karl Mannheim, Theodor Geiger and later Pierre Bourdieu ) and the newer sociology of science (Foucault, Knorr- Cetina, Latour ).