Bibliographic record
Abstract
More than thirty years ago, in their best-selling Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah and his colleagues coined the phrase “Social Science as Public Philosophy” (SSPP). They proposed it as an alternative to the “professional sociology” they believed had become increasingly hegemonic; too many sociologists, they contended, mistakenly embraced an ideal of social science modelled on the natural sciences. Instead, they championed a vision of sociology in which “the boundary between social science and philosophy was still open”—a vision they traced back to the classical works of Tocqueville, Durkheim, and others. Though rhetorically tantalizing and rich with critical potential, unfortunately SSPP remains undertheorized and thus neglected. Accordingly, the aim of this article is to systematically reconstruct, refine, and ultimately revive the sociological vision underlying SSPP. This vision consists of five pillars: (1) a rejection of the dualist aspiration to separate facts from values, in favour of an interpretive-cum-normative conception of social science; (2) a view of sociology as grounded in, and motivated by, specific traditions of ethical and philosophical inquiry; (3) transparency regarding the sociologist’s theoretical and normative commitments, and a willingness to subject them to public scrutiny; (4) an immanent conception of social criticism, which values identification rather than detachment; and (5) a commitment to democracy, substantively conceived. I contend that SSPP remains a vital resource for sociology today.
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.
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 | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.057 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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.
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".