SOCSCI 1A Week 1 (Chapters 1 and 2)

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Humans have always lived in societies, yet…

We have not considered the existence of a society, or its existence as a question to be investigated, for the majority of history.

Scientific Study of Society

The "Social Sciences" were only invented in the 1800s; disciplines like history or psychology are not just a body of facts to know, but a specific way of knowing. What this means is that each discipline must discover knowledge based on particular interests, questions, terminologies, and tools.

Social Sciences

A shared devotion to the study of people and societies (often framed as a subtype of the sciences existing in parallel to natural sciences). We have 5 main disciplines associated: anthropology, psychology, sociology, political science, and economics. Each of these disciplines has its own particular meanings regarding social areas of concentration and theoretical orientation (research).

What's the difference between the humanities and the social sciences?

How research is conducted; humanities can be thought of as having subjective/critical approaches to studying the social world, while social sciences are grounded more in the idea of research as based on scientific evidence and examining the world objectively.

Ivory Tower of Knowledge (Michelle Foucault)

Academia privileges natural sciences and gatekeeps expertise and knowledge reproduction based on how academia is structured. There is less room for longitudinal studies in favor of shorter, quicker studies, and transparency and knowledge sharing may be discouraged due to competition

Sociology of Knowledge (example)

Knowledge is not so much a fact found as it is made; emerged in the 1990s was more interested in how different kinds of social organization make orderings of knowledge possible. For example, one's generation profoundly affects one's knowledge because individuals who occupy the same generation share the same modes of thought, experience, feeling, and action.

Teachers

Agents of social knowledge. The school is a "social classifier" through 3 systems that produce social boundaries: curriculum/contents (someone must select the things worth knowing), pedagogy/teaching methods (how to teach), and evaluation.

Dimensions of Knowledge

Classification (boundaries between subject areas in a curriculum) and framing (teaching practices).

Collection Code

Areas of knowledge are kept neatly apart (studied separately with loyalty to a subject, like psychologist, sociologist, etc.).

Importance of Experts

Knowledge is socially constructed and distributed; different individuals/communities within a society know things at different depths.

Domain Specific

Expert knowledge is limited to a specific subject (but could also be general/integrative and cross subject boundaries), and can depend on education (from teachers who are experts, textbooks written by experts, etc.). They exist to serve society, like repositories of knowledge.

Authority Fallacies

Experts in one field's statements are somehow valid or superior to others, or dismiss other arguments. Experts can be wrong, though.

Power and Practice

When talking about knowledge, expertise, and prestige, there are techniques of power used by individuals, groups, and institutions that shape the knowledge of others (like curriculum, pedagogy, and evaluation, but also subtle forms of punishment like paddling).

Knowledge is Power

New knowledge can create new sites where power can be applied. Every institution is a society; schools, prisons, mental institutions, etc., all have various forms of power and knowledge.

Ex. Economic knowledge → public policy/government → creates think tanks that gatekeep access to their organizations.

Discursive Regime/Episteme (Power and Practice)

Foucault’s belief in the knowledge/power systems of society. What is literally possible to know or think in a given time/place; for example, germs were once unthinkable.

Hegemony (Power and Practice)

A somewhat informal, invisible form of knowledge power/dominance of one group used to win consent from another; from class-based perspectives, society's economic elites, for instance, can convince those with less wealth to support policies that primarily benefit the wealthy.

Social Reproduction

In the US, we consider education as a means of bettering one's position; schools have long tried to model themselves as meritocratic systems where individual talent prompts success. However, in a French study, it was found that schools tended to reproduce social missions by ensuring students remained in the same social class as their parents.

Enskillment

Even among experts, much knowledge, as such, may be socially derived. Some have pursued the notion that what we call "knowledge" is actually practices or skills/learned intuitions inscribed in the body rather than cognitive/verbal information processed.

Ex. Japanese potters don't "teach," but force apprentices to observe/emulate their skills.

Habitus

How we view ourselves, our dreams, our strengths, our limitations, and our chances in life in response to external influences over our lifetimes. It is taught to us through early childhood, through school, family, religion, and what we consume. Knowledge was less about facts and more about skills that individuals possess/use masterfully to act in society. Major life decisions are made based on the habits that we think about. Why go to UCI with the major you picked?

Cultural Capital

Another major factor in terms of social mobility has to do with knowledge, influences, behaviors, and preferences (Ex. Money from parents lets you have access to education, traveling, etc). Parents' knowledge may benefit you as well.

Contestation/Ignorance and Knowledge

The process of acquiring knowledge isn't automatic or passive. Subjugated knowledge is knowledge excluded from dominant discourse when a group's way of thinking and knowing itself becomes subject to a dominant culture (ex. Religious, political). Experts in giving fields often disagree with each other, like historians and psychiatrists. Human elements can always play a role.

Robert Proctor argued that ignorance is not merely the absence of knowledge, but

A social product that can be "deliberately engineered" and strategically plugged. Ignorance can also be the process of forgetting knowledge, can be withheld, suppressed, or contested, benefiting one group over another. Especially knowledge that contradicts other knowledge.

Tactics of Ignorance

Agnotology (the conjuring of ignorance though conspiracies, selective picking of evidence, censorship, or encouraging doubt, irrelevance (off-topic claims), and errors (inaccuracy and incompleteness).

Social Construction (Assumptions) of Scientific Knowledge

Scientific knowledge "progresses” (positivism: each day adds to science with more knowledge than before), superior to other forms of knowledge because of its method, and scientists are conscious of both.

Ludwik Fleck (Thought Collectives)

“Thought" is always a social or collective activity; people do not know in isolation, but as members of a community of thought (people who share ideas through their social interaction. “Pre-ideas" are ways of thinking that predate knowledge, inherited from long ago, and shape how we think about specific topics. Any scientific fact, therefore, is a historical and social achievement.

Thomas Kuhn (Paradigms)

A scientific revolution or change in scientific worldview is, in his words, a shift of paradigm (context of ideas that makes a theory plausible/sensible; the process was a series of revolutions in any given discipline, changing from one fundamental worldview to another).

The idea is that all scientists operate in a given paradigm, some model of reality/shared understanding of how the universe operates (includes methods, practices, and tools).

Ex. if you need to study microscopic organisms, you need a tool (microscope) to observe them; each paradigm brings its own language, like chemists speaking different languages from psychologists.

Karin Knorr-Cetina (Epistemic Cultures)

These are cultures that create and warrant knowledge. Different disciplines or cultural scientists do not abide by the same scientific method, which could undermine the argument that scientists should adopt the same epistemic culture as natural science; each social science and their subsciplines possess their own culture.

Taken together, the work of Fleck, Kuhn, Knorr-Cetina, and others indicates that…

There is no such single thing as “science” and no single “scientific method.”

The Idea of Social Science (Natural/Unnatural)

For most of human history, our institutions and practices were taken to be either natural (our way of life was just “the way it had to be”; there was nothing in particular to understand) or supernatural (our way of life was given to us by non-human agents (spirits, ancestors, gods), and knowledge of this authorship of our society was sufficient). From either of these positions, there was little to learn about society and virtually nothing to learn about other societies.

The first people to speculate about society, and to consider their own and other societies, were…

The Greeks; the philosopher was the person who sought wisdom, usually for its own sake, rather than accepting popular or traditional views.

Fundamentally, science as it has developed in the modern era is characterized by two key concepts:

Laws (mathematical descriptions, like the law of gravity) and causes (the necessary relationship between two variables or events).

Betty Ross and the American Flag

There is no actual evidence of Washington asking Ross to sew the flag; best considered as a legend rather than documented historical events. Legends are historical in nature and can be based on actual events/involve people. The unknown status of veracity places them in the domain of folklore.

History is more than just facts of the past; it is also a…

Narrative (a story that assembles facts in some meaningful way and an evaluation). History is always somebody's view; there is no such thing as being "objective" or a narrative told from someone's point of view or neutral history; we have different motivations for invoking history, not just to get the story.

Prehistoric

Archaeologists have referred to the study of human societies in the past that lack a written record as prehistoric; this encompasses the vast majority of all human history, since in modern times we think history starts with the advent of the written language. However, this doesn't necessarily mean humans weren't immersed in passing oral traditions around the world for thousands of years as a way to preserve collective memories of the past.

Why do Greek writings not qualify as what we consider history today?

Their record mostly documented the rise/fall of rulers/kings, as well as notable catastrophes like floods. For the Mesopotamians, it was even the rulers themselves who hired scribes to write their own history as a way of cementing their legitimacy (focused on documenting and remembering the experiences of ancestors). The same is the case with other ancient chronicles. Ancient books mixed history with theology to create documents of national memory and supernatural activity.

Who invented history as we generally view it now?

Ancient Greece. Lists of rulers were done to legitimize power, and religious histories and myths preserved the religious worldview of the group (e.g., epic poems establishing national pride). The Greeks, however, showed transition.

Herodotus

Applied the word “history” to his work; his concept of history is investigative and inquisitive, including recollections of his own experiences, such as activities of people of other cultures. However, there isn't much of an effort to separate what we think of as speculation, legends, and concrete facts.

Thucydides

Most known for his accounts of the war between Athens and Sparta. He had a narrower focus, considering defining conflicts of the ancient Greek era; he preserved speeches of the wars that he observed. His work included detailed speeches from important characters. Thucydides confesses that some of these speeches he himself put together were likely said in the given circumstances.

Utopian Literature

Another genre emerged, imagining alternative ways of living/new values for the future, describing happier societies that linked certain characteristics with historical thinking; history was absent and obsolete. For modern historical thinking to emerge, "history" had to be emancipated from both utopia and religion.

Hegel’s Philosophy of History

History is supposed to convey the progress of freedom done collectively by humanity as a whole (not just specific individuals). Certain states embody the spirit at a given time, and certain individuals embody the state at given times. This ties into the concept of the “great men,” where certain people were foundational pieces for larger historical accomplishments, embodied individual thought that drove historical progress, and set into motion a world of great man theory.

In a nutshell, the active force in human history is not the individual or community but the Idea, taking the form of space (nature) and takes the form of time (spirit). Individuals reach their fullest potential in the State, which is like the body of the spirit.

In other words, the progress of the ideal spirit through self-consciousness is human history.

Marquis de Condorcet’s “Universal History”

Past human achievements were placed in a single narrative. He believed the focus should be on the group and the group's struggle. Individual stories of each nation deemphasize the role of individual humans. A totalizing discourse of humanity's past, while privileging the status/past of one's preferred culture.

Marx and Historical Materialism

Studying the Industrial Revolution and the growth of capitalism, he noticed that the movement was bringing fundamental change to human populations and saw a division between two classes (the bourgeoisie/capitalists and the proletariat/propertyless workers).

Believing the bourgeoisie were becoming newfound wealthy elites as opposed to traditional wealth based on royalty, what was important was that the bourgeoisie owned the means of production (factories, mines, farms) and the proletariat had to sell labor to survive.

Marx's framing of history was that history is the history of class struggles. Marx also rejected the history of the state/nation itself, somehow driving history because he saw nations and states as recent innovations in history. A nation-based model of history was incorrect, false consciousness.

He believed the bourgeoisie was growing to envelop other areas, like means of communication and education; as a result, the proletariat would gradually begin to understand their plight, oppression, and develop a class consciousness, the recognition of their collective interests and inequality.

Marx's key contribution was the discussion of historical change in economic infrastructure, serving as a source of change in the political sphere, influencing several scholars. His conception of history is known as historical materialism; those who control the means of production in society play a key role but are merely actors in economic forces driving change.

Summary: Marx believed that the history of all existing societies was the history of class struggle; each person was the product of their historical period. The state was the result of inverted forms; the nation and its collectivities (race, religion) were lingering sources of false consciousness.

Historicism

Any person, society, or state can be understood in historical context; looking at the past helps us see through the eyes of today.

Durkheim envisioned society as…

Bodies that grew/changed through a series of stages (like Darwinism); history, sociology, and anthropology in the late 19th century cannot be divorced from imperialism. This leads to another idea, that history is a construct of the modern world; there is no objective view of the past. When we look back at the past, we view it from our own historical/cultural lens for our own historical purposes.

Example: We take a modern idea of aliens and impose it on the traditions, achievements, and technologies of past cultures around the world (like claims that they made pyramids). We take achievements away from these groups.

Main Ideas and Issues of Week 1 (History and Knowledge)

History is not the past, but the knowledge of the past (which depends on our sources, methods, and interests), and that history/"historical thinking" depends on the "idea of history" (or, what history is and what it is trying to tell us).

Any consideration of historical knowledge must confront three problems: what historians want to know, how they know it, and how they write it.

Historical Knowledge

Fundamental to historical thinking is, naturally, chronological order. One key concept is periodization, the specification of distinct periods in history. This is the historical version of the general scientific project of typology or taxonomy (classifying and naming different kinds of things).

Typologies face challenges, like the real world being more complicated than could be expressed. Typologies would be a simplification, an idealization.

Historians also don't agree on when to draw lines between historical periods. Labels are also not frequently applied to all societies/civilizations.

Historians are also crucially concerned with the decisions and actions of people in their chronological context; in other words, how circumstances at a given point in time provide the antecedent conditions for human decisions and actions.

How do Historians Construct Knowledge?

How do history books and textbooks know what they are presenting? Despite students being required to study history, they rarely are taught how to think like historians; instead, they are taught how to memorize rather than think in scholarly ways.

The most basic problem in historical research is sources. Historians engage in "source criticism," interrogating the validity of their sources. Gilbert Garraghan specified six questions that historians should ask about their sources.

These are external criticisms, questions. Historians can also attempt internal criticism in judging the contents of sources for bias or believability.

Historiography: Writing History

Historiography is the study of the way history has been written. Historians, like authors and researchers, write for specific audiences.

Textbooks are interesting, since they transmit ways of thinking to the next generation.

Definitions of history books: bad writing, cartoons, stereotypes, confusion, and diverse interpretations.

Historians have to prioritize, organize, and interpret the materials chosen to produce the secondary document (in other words, creating history). Historiography is the study of historical writings, examining differences/changes in historical interpretations of the past.

Like with natural/social sciences, historians abide by their own paradigms. Academic history is written for other academics; historical textbooks are written for students.