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Record W2008734602 · doi:10.1177/0092055x0803600402

What is Critical About Sociology?

2008· article· en· W2008734602 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueTeaching Sociology · 2008
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicContemporary Sociological Theory and Practice
Canadian institutionsCentre for Movement Disorders
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSociologyEpistemologyCritical theoryPerspective (graphical)Value (mathematics)HumanismVirtueCritical thinkingSociological imaginationSocial scienceLawPhilosophyPedagogy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Critical thinking is often presented as a generic technique. This article develops an alternative that links critique more closely to the sociological perspective. I suggest three answers to the above question: that the sociological perspective is critical for comprehending complex issues, that all sociology is implicitly critical by virtue of its debunking tendency, and that some sociology is explicitly critical by virtue of value commitments that lead to a critique of domination. The article identifies some basic themes of what it means to think sociologically, discusses sociology's “double critique” in more detail, illustrates the critical potential of scientific, humanistic and critical approaches to sociology, and explores some implications of this approach for how we teach sociology. It concludes by suggesting that the goal of fostering critical thinking in our students might better be met by returning to the critical roots of our own discipline.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.005
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.005
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies, Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesScience and technology studies
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.552
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0050.005
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0040.008
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0010.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.110
GPT teacher head0.425
Teacher spread0.315 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it