Habitus and Utopia in Science: Bourdieu, Mannheim, and the Role of Specialties in the Scientific Field
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Pierre Bourdieu has claimed that his concept of the habitus resolves the objectivism/constructivism debate in the sociology of science. While institutional norms require that scientists maintain a disinterested attitude, studies have revealed that scientists often fail to live up to the normative standard of disinterestedness, sometimes becoming highly tendentious to promote their own work. Bourdieu resolves the interested/disinterested paradox by claiming that scientists promote their own personal interests through objective science. This is supposed to be the consequence of the scientific habitus, which ensures that the biases of the scientific field remain invisible to scientists who operate within it. The concept of the habitus is central to Bourdieu’s theory of science. However, it has suffered from two major shortcomings: 1) the scientific field is made up of clusters of specializations which are shaped by interactions with each other, and the habitus does not account for these mesolevel interactions; 2) it can only account for reproduction of the scientific field and therefore ignores the mechanisms which produce change. I argue that Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge may be employed to better understand how the properties of scientific specialties both reproduce interested and disinterested behavior among scientists and facilitate change in particular specialty areas. Key words: Pierre Bourdieu; Karl Mannheim; Habitus; Utopia; Field Theory; Specialization; Constructivism; Objectivism; Scientific Change
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".