Source: Value-free science?: Purity and power in modern knowledge, 1991, p. 10
Source: Value-free science?: Purity and power in modern knowledge, 1991, p. 10
Source: Science and Hypothesis (1901), Ch. I. (1905) Tr. George Bruce Halstead
Ideology and Utopia (1929)
Context: This first non-evaluative insight into history does not inevitably lead to relativism, but rather to relationism. Knowledge, as seen in the light of the total conception of ideology, is by no means an illusory experience, for ideology in its relational concept is not at all identical with illusion. Knowledge arising out of our experience in actual life situations, though not absolute, is knowledge none the less. The norms arising out of such actual life situations do not exist in a social vacuum, but are effective as real sanctions for conduct. Relationism signifies merely that all of the elements of meaning in a given situation have reference to one another and derive their significance from this reciprocal interrelationship in a given frame of thought. Such a system of meanings is possible and valid only in a given type of historical existence, to which, for a time, it furnishes appropriate expression. When the social situation changes, the system of norms to which it had previously given birth ceases to be in harmony with it. The same estrangement goes on with reference to knowledge and to the historical perspective. All knowledge is oriented toward some object and is influenced in its approach by the nature of the object with which it is pre-occupied. But the mode of approach to the object to be known is dependent upon the nature of the knower.
“Science is… in the broadest sense of organized, objective knowledge.”
Source: The Nature of Geography (1939), p. 139
Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 251
The establishment of “criteria” for testing the correctness of opinions then becomes the most important task. Genuine and fruitful criticism judges all opinions with reference to the object itself. Ressentiment criticism, on the contrary, accepts no “object” that has not stood the test of criticism
Source: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), L. Coser, trans. (1973), pp. 67-68
Lecture IX : On the Conduct of the Understanding
Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy (1849)
Equinoctial Regions of America (1814-1829)
Source: Superiority and Subordination as Subject-matter of Sociology (1896), p. 167
