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Writer's pictureDru Morrison

Reality, Reason and the their roles in Sociology

Science cannot capture reality because reality is not reasonable a lot of times and science is governed by reason. Reason is the vocabulary, history and belief that science has to maintain in order to have a basis for communication. Without reason, science crumbles. But reality and reason are not one and the same. Reality does not take its cues from reason, but vice versa. Reason is a part of reality, but it can hardly be said that its the only thing. I'm not even sure I like the clean break between reason and reality that I'm presenting, but that so-called 'break' is mostly because the idea of 'reality' is indefinable for me, while reason is, though complex and dense, is seemingly more limited, and thus, understandable.

Reason, and thus sociology, should perhaps realize (perhaps succumb to?) its place within the phenomena it studies, instead of trying to method its way into a space of omnipotence.


But isn't that wholly unsatisfactory? This the trouble with Foucault, to an extent. It's all well and good to recognize the short-comings of science when it's believed that science is attempting to be omnipotent. Omnipotence really is one of the main antagonists to science's development over the past centuries. But what if that's wrong? What if that's an unreasonable charaterization of science? What if omnipotence in science is instead thought of as neither a fool's errand, or an achievable (if not already achieved) goal, but as the desire, the belief, motivating scientific endeavour?


I reserve every right to rescind my support of all of these musings lol.

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