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Studies in the sociology of knowledge share a common theme, the social foundations of thought: ideas, concepts, and belief systems share an intrinsic sociality explained by the contexts in which they emerge. From its origins in German sociology in the 1920s, the sociology of knowledge examines how ideas (knowledges) emerge out of and are determined by the social contexts and positions (structural locations) of their proponents. More recently, its subject matter has included not only a society’s authoritative ideas and formal knowledges, but also those knowledges that operate in the realm of everyday life, informal knowledges.
According to its framers, Max Scheler and Karl Mannheim, Wissenssoziologie was an empirical and historical method for resolving the conflicts of ideologies in Weimar Germany that followed the political and social revolutions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, conflicts grounded in competing worldviews and directed by intellectual and...
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References
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McCarthy, E.D. (2013). Knowledge, Sociology of. In: Runehov, A.L.C., Oviedo, L. (eds) Encyclopedia of Sciences and Religions. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8265-8_1310
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8265-8_1310
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