Objectivity, Sociology and Measurement ... Hodges' model

individual

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INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ----------------------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

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group - population

"Big data is all the rage.  We have become increasingly obsessed in economics and in medicine and in public policy with what can be measured. Evidence-based is always better it would seem, than going with our gut or worse, a wild guess that springs from our biases. This passion for evidence is not new. Carved in stone, on the outside of the social science building where I got my PhD at the University of Chicago is a quote attributed to Lord Kelvin, the physicist who gave us the Kelvin temperature scale and who died in 1907:" “When you cannot measure, your knowledge is meager and unsatisfactory.” Russ Roberts

"Like Weber and Dilthey, Mannheim opposes the positivist approach which seeks to render all social facts measureable and 'unambiguously ascertainable'. He invites us:- 'to think what becomes of our psychic and social world when it is restricted to purely externally measureable relationships', and argues that 'There can no longer be any doubt that no real penetration into social reality is possible through this approach . . . It is clear that a human situation is characterizable only when one has also taken into account those conceptions which the participants have of it, how they experience their tensions in this situation, and how they react to the tensions so conceived." p.160-161.   THE TASKS OF SOCIOLOGY "The tasks which are presented to sociology are of a two-fold character. On the one hand there is the need to establish a valid model for the analysis of a particular social system which he is studying. And on the other hand, once such a model is established he may be faced with explaining some partial and particularized form of behaviour in terms of the part it plays in the total system. However, in any particular research situation there will be a choice as to what shall be regarded as a total system, that is what the scale of our interest should be, or what segment of the total system we should study." p.185.   Mannaheim's "proposals for a sociology of knowledge". p.165.

Sources:

Adam Smith, Loneliness, and the Limits of Mainstream Economics
Russ Roberts

https://medium.com/@russroberts/adam-smith-loneliness-and-the-limits-of-mainstream-economics-f0be78940e17

Also summarised in MoneyWeek.

Rex, J. (1968) Key Problems of Sociological Theory, 4th Edition. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited.

(... continued sorting through old books... )