On Being Responsibly out of One's Sociological Depth Available to Purchase

My discussion has assumptions and a tone which I should delineate at the outset. My first assumption is that all education is at least indirectly moral education and that while moral development should not be the explicit focus of our teaching, it is certainly a byproduct of what and how we teach. My second assumption is that the conceptual structures and methodologies of the social sciences embody a “value slant” and they do this inevitably. Broady (1974, p. 62) makes good sense when he suggests that the sociologist does best not by striving to be neutral but to be fair and impartial. This involves a difficult and ever maturing “detachment‐in‐commitment” which I think is an appropriate meaning for what Max Weber called the vocation of the social scientist. My third assumption is that the student expectation that the social sciences critically illuminate their world is legitimate. Sociological concepts devoid of historical specificity are also devoid of significant meaning, for they then become, at best, purely formal, and, at worst, pretentious abstractions. The question “Knowledge for what?” is not anti‐intellectual but rooted in the deepest and most responsible respect for truth. Even the academic search for truth does not entail a privileged indifference to the human process as a whole (Williams, 1977, p. 156).