How Epistemology Matters: Five Reflexive Critiques of Public Sociology
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.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article analyses Michael Burawoy’s vision of public sociology in light of five distinct ‘epistemic strategies’, each of which generates substantially different expectations regarding the challenges and opportunities facing public sociologists. The five epistemic strategies range along a spectrum from methodological individualism at one end to holism at the other. Between these two poles, considerations of the social relativity of scientific knowledge arise. Constructionist theories highlight the performative dilemma entailed when science reveals itself to be one narrative among others. Hierarchical theories such as Marxism suggest that public sociology is torn by the irreconcilable contradiction between hegemony and counter-hegemony. Heterarchical theories address both of these two problems together. Heterarchy suggests that science’s claim to universality may interfere with public sociology’s social-transformative aspirations. However, the dynamic complexity of ‘public’ social struggles generates opportunities to rethink the place of difference in the production of scientific knowledge.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 it