Sociology cannot address group self-understanding without historical interpretation and dialectical communication

Evidence

Questions concerning this realm of experience, because they cannot be answered by technically utilizable information, are not capable of explanation by empirical-analytical research. Nevertheless, since its beginnings in the eighteenth century, sociology tried to discuss these very questions. In so doing, it cannot do without historically-orientated interpretations; nor, apparently, can it evade a form of communication under the spell of which alone these problems pose themselves. I refer to the dialectical network of a communicative context in which individuals develop their fragile identity between the dangers of reification and formlessness. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2428

Categorization

• XREF: Foregrounds Habermas’s later communicative action paradigm as the response to empirical-analytical limits. — connects to: Interpreting a group’s self-descriptions requires avoiding both scientific neutrality and uncritical acceptance — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 783; Classical social theory neglected communication and motivation as second-order concepts. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 586; Knowing another culture needs uncoercive contact and interpretive self-consciousness — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the…, 328 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Interpreting a group’s self-descriptions requires avoiding both scientific neutrality and uncritical acceptance #expands (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 783
• Knowing another culture needs uncoercive contact and interpretive self-consciousness #corroborates (0.78) — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 328
• Communication is never neutral but embeds constitutive historical power relations #complicates (0.75) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 996
• Sociology attempts an exact positivist science of social facts #contradicts (0.75) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1523
• Sociology derives from vulgar evolutionism and cannot grasp the dialectical principle #corroborates (0.74)
• Classical social theory neglected communication and motivation as second-order concepts. #expands (0.72) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 586