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Sociologists and Knowledge
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2022
Extract
It is the proudest boast of the sciences that they are objective, clean of moral judgments, wertfrei. This insistence was salutary as the physical sciences struggled to loose themselves from the bonds of tradition, and it was natural that the social sciences took over the emphasis. Yet by a quirk of history the latter disciplines in striving for objectivity and amorality are unscientific. Far from being the hallmark of scientific method that students of society think it, the doctrine of Wertfreiheit is of religious origin. It has always been the spokesmen of tradition who have said that science is without reference to morals and value, relegating this province to themselves.
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- Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1947
References
1 Ashley-Montagu, M. F., Coming into being among the Australian aborigines (London, 1937).
2 R. K. Merton, “The Sociology of Knowledge,” paper given before the seminar of the Dept. of Sociology, Columbia University, April, 1945.
3 Ashley-Montagu, op. cit., pp. 333–5
4 Malinowski, B., “Foreword” to Ashley-Montagu, op. cit., p. xxix.
5 Ayres, C. E., Theory of economic progress (Chapel Hill, 1944), p. 217.
6 “The Australian boomerang,” Malinowski writes, “obeys the dictates not only of common sense but of differential calculus. It does so because the Australian has empirically discovered the principles governing the boomerang's flight and embodied them in his tradition of production and use of his implement. Were [he] to swerve the fraction of an inch in the making of the boomerang [it] would not fly its curved course.” Such facts, Malinowski goes on to say, bear witness that “when it comes to technology, a … trait is fully determined by natural conditions and the function which it is meant to fulfill.” With this in mind he criticizes the viewpoint of Ashley-Montagu and other sociologists of knowledge: “… It is perhaps going too far to say that in all aspects of human experience and tradition, culture can be considered as an autonomous centre of specific determinism, completely unaffected by the real categories of objective reality and of adequate human behavior. This emphatically is not the case with regard to those aspects of man's activities where in a technological process he has to achieve definite practical results by the work of his own hands, legs, and body, and in which his brain acts as the main coordinating agency.” (Op. cit., pp. xxviii–ix.)
7 Op. cit., p. 337.
8 Ibid., p. 13.
9 Ibid., p. 29 f.