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Barry Barnes, The Sociology of Relevance, and the Relevance of Sociology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Adrian Edwards CSSp
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I thought of putting something in the title about theology. Better not. Juxtaposing theology and any single social science might recall the sermon in The Way of All Flesh in which geology was shown first to be totally without significance for theology and then to be positive evidence for the literal truth of Genesis. If theology is to be explained away by sociology, that shows insufferable presumption. If theology could be helped by sociology, which would mean that theologians could or should learn something of it, then this would seem to burden yet further theological curricula. If sociology has no special relevance, but yet is an honourable way of earning a living, both sociologists and theologians should continue to cultivate their separate gardens; but is this not the old idea that something could be true in theology and false in philosophy, and vice-versa, which so annoyed Aquinas?

Fundamentally, the objection to the involvement of sociology in theology seems to be that sociology developed to study things going wrong. There can be a sociology of error; can there be a sociology of truth? The best way of answering this seems to be to look at the work of the American historian of science, T S Kuhn, as presented by the Edinburgh sociologist, Barry Barnes.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 64 , Issue 762 , December 1983 , pp. 522 - 531
Copyright
Copyright © 1983 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Usually, the second edition, 1970, University of Chicago Press, is quoted.

2 Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, pp x + 109, £4.75.

3 Macmillan, pp xiv + 135, £3.95.

4 Interests and the Growth of Knowledge. p 1.

5 Knowledge and Human Interests (English translation), London, 1912.

6 D A Mackenzie and S B Barnes, "Biometrician v Mendelian: a controversy and its explanation". Kolner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie. vol 18 (1975), pp 165-96.

7 Lucian Goldmann, The Hidden God (English translation), London, 1964.

8 Interests and the Growth of Knowledge, p 86.

9 First published in 1935, English translation in 1979.

10 T S Kuhn and Social Science, p 16.

11 T S Kuhn and Social Science, p 17.

12 T S Kuhn and Social Science, p 56.

13 H M Collins, "The Seven Sexes: a Study in the Sociology of a Phenomenon, or the Replication of Experiments in Physics" in Barry Barnes and David Edge (editors), Science in Context, Open University Press, 1982.

14 T S Kuhn and Social Science, p 92.

15 Brian Wynne, "Physics and Psychics; Science, Symbolic Action and Social Control in Late Victorian England" in Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin, Natural Order, (1979). reprinted in Barnes and Edge, Science in Context.

16 For instance, consider the difference between the dependence of the Baroque Church on the Catholic monarchies, and the alliance of the nineteenth century Church with the peasants and petty bourgeoisic. Historians who with naive cynicism ascribe the rise of Ultramontanism to power-hungry Vatican officials should try to apply the method of Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.