Sociology 2240E Lecture Notes - Lecture 21: Moral Agency, Intersubjectivity, Pragmatics
30 Apr 2018
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Department
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Professor
Course wrap up
Thursday, April 26, 2018
3:07 PM
Point of departure
• Key thematic questions of this year:
o Where do my ideas come from? Questions of knowledge, belief, ideology, and inquiry
o Who am I? questions of 'subjectivity', identity, biography, and status
o What is the meaning of this? Questions of how we make sense of the social world, its effects
on persons, and its historical trajectory
o What ought I to do? Questions of reflexivity, action, and moral agency
• Key themes this semester: the stakes get higher
o The irrationality of rationality
o The critique of power
o The pragmatics of intersubjectivity
o The politics of truth
o The reclamation of agency
• 'crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born'
Connell: in praise of sociology
• 'we do sociology today under the shadow of nuclear war and environmental catastrophe'
• Will sociology have a firm role to play in 'ambitions intellectual projects' seeking solutions to
global problems?
• …or ill it ed to arket pressures to e ireasigl 'etertaiig' et itelletuall auous
• Connell suggests a need for information but also analysis
o Descriptive sociology produces useful information that a democratic and informed society
needs to have
• '…ut soethig ore is eeded to produe soiologial uderstadig for atio to hage
conditions (we face).'
• Here we are in the territory of theory, critique, and other forms of research more oriented to
social process
On committing sociology
• Mills argued that we need a particular 'quality of mind' that will enable us to use information and
develop reason
o …ut today, the exercise of this quality of faces additional obstacle that we must confront
• Oxford dictionary word of the year: post-truth
o Adjective: relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential
in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief
So what does this mean for the validity of sociology as a science?
• Does it follow that there is no such thing as truth -that all facts are relative, subjective,
irredeemably biased?
• Key takeaways for the course: no, but it does mean a few things
o Some reasons are better than others
• Coherent argumentation is better than contradiction
• Argumentation supported by evidence is better than arguments supported by
opinions
• Evidence that comprehensively represents an existing state of affairs is better than
convenient anecdotes or tidbits
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