This paper examines the ways in which social scientific discourse and classification interact with the objects of social scientific investigation. I examine this interaction in the context of the traditional philosophical project of demarcating the social sciences from the natural sciences. I begin by reviewing Ian Hacking’s work on interactive classification and argue that there are additional forms of interaction that must be treated.

This paper challenges the charge of inferiority, on the basis of objectivity, against the social sciences. The idea of objectivity is that facts about the state of the world and entities in it are observed or studied without a taint of personal bias, value judgement or particular perspective. The social sciences are accused of falling short of the requirements of objectivity hence they are considered inferior to the natural sciences which are claimed to merit the requirements. This paper argues that (...) the idea of objectivity has been misleadingly conceived as a method exclusive only to the natural sciences. The paper maintains that if the concept of objectivity is conceptually analysed and conceived in a strict sense, the ideals and requirements of objectivity would be outside the ken of both the natural sciences and the social sciences. However, if the concept of objectivity is conceived in a moderate sense, the social sciences would merit being called objective as much as the natural sciences. Thus, a conceptual analysis will show that both the natural sciences and social sciences are at par on the threshold of objectivity. Thus, the paper submits that the social sciences are not inferior to the natural sciences on the basis of objectivity. (shrink)

An analysis is provided for one possible practical link between rhetorical and social scientific inquiry. That link is found in the rhetoric of the reasoned social scientific fact. Understanding this point of intersection involves grounding a rhetorical theory of how to create and to evaluate arguments (a rhetorical theory of invention and judgment) in the practical problems that confront contemporary social scientists during their efforts to construct reasoned social facts. The applicability of this invention and judgment framework to analysis of (...) the rhetoric of social science is illustrated with reference to a controversy over the legitimacy of rules theoretic explanations of human communication processes. Implications of the practical link between rhetorical and social scientific inquiry are then drawn out. (shrink)

I examine here Theory and Scholarship (taken to be formalized social scientific frameworks that seek to map out the real world and social actions in an objective fashion) via an autoethnographic lens. Chiefly, I ask how autoethnography as a research method reconfigures them: how may we extend knowledge using autoethnography? While much critique has centered on the "doing" (dispassionately?) versus "being" (going native?) of autoethnography, I argue that such a dichotomy is inherently false. Instead, doing is located within the ethnographer's (...) very being, so that a closer look at the autoethnographic research process is required, from conception to implementation to introspection. I attempt such a processual analysis here: drawing on an earlier social scientific project, I relate the intellectual and social process whereby it was translated into an autoethnography. Using a performative lens to illustrate the dialectical mode of doing and being in the research process, I intersperse portions of personal narrative with academic writing, to enable a disjunctural appreciation of the various layers of interpretation. While the epistemic framework I hold to here is indeed a poststructural one, privileging fragmentation and social situatedness, it also emphasizes continuity and interconnections in the research process. (shrink)