2026/07/28 by Gabriel Peters
paper · pdf · doi:10.1177/07255136261467764
openalex publication_date 2026/07/28 · openalex created_date 2026/07/29 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
In a field marked by so many disagreements, few lessons seem as firmly established as the social-scientific claim that society does not exist only outside subjectivities, but also, and decisively, within and through them, by shaping their ways of acting, thinking and feeling.Yet, in revealing the decisive influence of the social world on the very ways in which subjects apprehend it, social science has also produced the unintended effect of casting suspicion on its own epistemic foundations, especially insofar as the thesis of the social conditioning of thought is applied to social scientists themselves.If points of view on the social universe are interested, partial and situated, as the social sciences seem to reveal, do these properties not undermine the very truth claims of those same sciences, including the claim contained in the statement that 'points of view on social life are interested, partial and situated'?From Marx and Engels (1970 [1845-46]) to feminist epistemologists such as Sandra Harding (1996) and Patricia Hill Collins (1990), via Lukács (1971[1923]) and Mannheim (1960Mannheim ( [1936]]), a variety of authors have emphasized that 'points of view' on the social world are 'views from a [particular] point' (Bourdieu, 2000: 183) within that same world.In reflecting on the conditions of possibility of genuine knowledge about social life, while confronting the socially and historically situated character of the knowing subject in the human sciences, this heterogeneous lineage has had to respond to at least four orders of questions.First comes the identification of the main positional influences upon the knowing subject, such as class, race, gender, sexuality and other axes of social differentiation, not to mention their complex intersections.A second set of problems concerns the