I have a particular curiosity about these tacit “applied epistemologies” – what they are, what they imply, what they allow us to perceive clearly, and what they obscure. I don’t think everyone needs to devote their every waking breath to these sorts of questions, but I think they’re very important questions for some people to explore in detail, and for everyone to think about at some time or another.

Experimental scientists do sometimes “go to town” (as we say state-side) with their new toys. It can be breathtaking what a scientist can conclude as soon as the plausible implications of the data extend just a little beyond the ken of his or her peer reviewers. If I recall correctly, some of the oldest problems in linguistics and the philosophy of mind were all but solved by early fMRI studies.

This knife, however, cuts both ways: there are limits to scientific disciplinary approaches, as well as social scientific ones, and the core epistemological question remains the same, regardless of whether we’re talking about interpreting DNA or archaeological sites: if we don’t have a sufficiently clear understanding of how we perceive the world, and of why particular questions interest us, while others do not, we are very likely to make significant, and completely avoidable, mistakes with our interpretations.

Just to give a very basic example: I did some work at one point developing a curriculum, techniques, etc., for working with students with poor reading proficiency. At the time, I was reading fairly widely in cognitive science, looking particularly at research into how people learn to read, how fluent readers approach text, etc. There was some fantastic stuff in this material: eye movement studies, investigations of brain injuries that affected the process of reading in very specific ways, etc. The approaches were very scientific, used all the latest toys, etc. And it yielded some really useful information.

It also, however, tended to overgeneralise the findings from research that was mostly done, for example, in countries with an alphabetic language – and therefore to conclude that certain things were “necessary” or “natural” to reading acquisition, when one could actually fairly easily demonstrate these things were neither “necessary” nor “natural”, if one looked at studies done of readers in non-alphabetic systems.

This was, of course, an easily correctible error – I just counterposed what I was researching on alphabetic systems with the results of studies of, for example, reading skills acquisition among Chinese readers. But it was nevertheless a bit disturbing how quickly some authors leapt to over-generalised conclusions – I think, in part, because scientific-style methodologies invoke an aura of universality. A greater familiarity with historical, anthropological, and other social science methodology can help puncture this universalistic veil, and move us closer to understanding the limits of our knowledge – which (as chaos theory, among other approaches, suggests) actually gives us a clearer sense of the level of confidence we can have in the conclusions we draw.

Not at all, at least not in principle. A biological approach lets you draw inferences from baboons and phylogeny and anatomy and physiology and DNA and paleoclimatology and on medical and psychological and imaging experiments in animals and drugged or lesioned humans and on and on. The biologists got the tools my boy. If you’re wise you’ll seek a collaboration…or your doctoral students’ doctoral students will. This may take a while.

I do, though, believe that epistemology – the question of how we know what we claim to know – needs serious and sustained attention. And it often doesn’t get the attention it requires. And it may in fact not get any attention in a survey course…

There are, though, academic traditions in the social sciences that pay a great deal of attention to epipstemological questions. I suspect that someone like Adorno, for example, would respond to your request to “keep it real”, by saying that there is more than one way we can divorce ourselves from reality. One of those ways, as you have pointed out, it to assume without justification that we are fundamentally different from everyone who has come before. Another, however, is to become so tied to our immediate reality that we lose sight of the question of whether that reality could be any different from how it currently is – and thus constrain ourselves, even as we distort our conception of the past.

On one level, Weber speaks of “progress” in a transhistorical sense – as a world-historical process of “rationalisation” that sweeps across human history and through multiple societies. In other places, including the passage quoted above, I think you could make a case that Weber recognises a qualitative distinction between the forms of “progress” that characterise contemporary society (and the forms of subjectivity associative with an aggressively future-oriented social form), and previous forms of social life that were not so coercively future-driven.

In the passage above, Weber is effectively arguing that there is a negative side to the form of “progress” that characterises our social world – in his account, an inability to ever be completely fulfilled. Weber offers this diagnosis – much like Freud does in some of his writings – in the assumption that there is nothing we can do about this situation, but that, as social scientists, we need to recognise and understand the situation to which history has driven us.

Habermas, along with other theorists who believe this crisis of meaning, etc., is not inevitable, tries to thread through this issue in a different way – in Habermas’ case, by arguing that the actual path followed by rationalisation under capitalism can be distinguished from a potential alternative, more emancipatory path.

So, where Weber might have felt we could look nostalgically backward to historical periods not characterised by a similar crisis of meaning, he would have argued that a contemporary human could not adopt that same subjective orientation to the modern world, and still remain “rational”. Habermas argues, by contrast, that current society is actually not particularly rational (or, at least, not fully rational) – and that this incomplete rationalisation is responsible for any crisis of meaning we may experience.

I have my disagreements with both Weber and Habermas – but neither of them, I would suggest, offers an analysis that is particularly based on the concept of social class. And in this respect, at least, I think they’re both onto something… ;-P They are both asking questions that are more fundamental in scope than the questions typically associated with, say, relativising one’s epistemic position by acknowledging personal class bias, etc. This is a major reason I find it productive to play off against both of them.