Kieran Healy has an excellent post up from a few days ago defending sociology from a few intemperate sociology bashers. It’s worth reading, along with the somewhat rambling comments thread.

One rather familiar question crops up frequently in the discussion. Is sociology a science? I don’t really know, but I think asking questions like that is so, like, twentieth century. The real question in these post-positivist times is whether sociology contributes to what we know about the world. (Or, if you have other interests, does syntax contribute to knowledge, does developmental psychology, does comparative literature, and so on.) And there’s no way to tell whether that is true except by bearing down and reading cutting-edge sociology (or whatever), and comparing one’s epistemic situation afterwards to what it was like before. Since one never precisely knows what one knows, this won’t be an infallible guide to whether sociology contributes to knowledge. But it will be a much better guide than just asking whether sociology would have satisfied enough formal constraints to be let dine at high table in the Popperian academy.

It’s surprising how persuasive Popper persists in being. The little theory of justification I’ve been working on recent starts by saying, more or less in these words, that I’m assuming everything that everything Fodor believes about modularity is correct. Since Fodor’s hypotheses are testable and if Fodor’s theories are refuted then so is my little theory of justification, it turns out that epistemology as I do it is a science if Popper is right. Should we apply modus ponens or modus tollens here? We report…