Knowledge or Knowledges?

The article reviews two essays related to knowledge and culture. Knowledge is a ghost to social scientists. It spooks their work. For them, it is a subject unlike any other. Knowledge, to be sure, is what they, the social ones, like all other scientists, produce. Some people in the humanities may still search for truth, or truths, but scientists produce knowledge. Yet, unlike the more normatively respectable scientists, social scientists understand that their knowledge is forever haunted by the mysterious circumstances of its origins and passing away. Knowledge of the social produced by social beings is never, nor can it ever be, what it seems. It arises necessarily out of the experiences its producers have as members of the social orders they study. For this very reason, its factual certitude withers to a relative wisp nearly as soon as it is born. Knowledge of the social-by-social beings is a subject that, by its very nature, frightens the knower because it cannot, or will not, be contained by the more comfortable methods and categories of science. This is why so many sociologists, a good number of political scientists, and even some academic psychologists and economists will cash their pay checks in the name of an official department of social science, while, in their work-a-day lives, they disavow the rules and ideals of science itself, seeking instead the gentler comfort of methods borrowed from history, ethnography, philosophy, even literary criticism.