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Essays:

Warner. 2011. Dialogical History and the History of a Dialogue: Three Visions of The Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations at the University of Chicago.

ABSTRACT

The Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations (CCSNN) was a forum at the University of Chicago for interdisciplinary dialogue on a loosely related set of theoretical and empirical questions in the social sciences. Although the CCSNN played an important role in the intellectual development of many prominent scholars, its role in the history of the social sciences has been largely forgotten. Drawing on archival research and interviews with its members, I seek to evaluate how different models of history influence our understanding of the CCSNN. To this end, I organize this paper around three questions: 1) What was the CCSNN and why was it influential in the intellectual lives of its members? 2) How was it created? and 3) Why has it been largely forgotten from disciplinary self-histories? In answering these questions, I distinguish three visions of the history of the social sciences: “whig” history, sociological reductionism, and dialogical history. Whereas the first two approach texts as purely semantic statements, the third views texts as utterances that can only be understood contextually—a text’s semantic aspects cannot be divorced from its pragmatic aspects. I argue that the most important feature of the CCSNN was its ability to foster dialogue across disciplines, theories, and areas; accordingly, only a dialogical history is capable of representing dialogue at the CCSNN.

Warner. 2010. “An Inquiry Concerning Human Knowing: A Critique of the Sociology of Knowledge.”

ABSTRACT

The sociology of knowledge emerged from multiple independent efforts of social theorists to engage with 19th century Western philosophy. Such engagement resulted in what I term the symbiotic image of the relationship between knowledge and society, as two actually existing and functionally integrated systems. In place of the dichotomy between rationalism and empiricism, the symbiotic image produced a dichotomy between realism and constructionism. I argue that this development has inhibited a sociological understanding of human knowing and meaning-making. I trace an alternative approach to the question of knowledge from C.S. Peirce’s semiotic through the symbolic theories of John Dewey, Kenneth Burke, and Clifford Geertz. After reviewing recent research in the sociology of science—as heir to the sociology of knowledge—I conclude with speculations on how a sociology of knowing can proceed by combining the insights of semiotics with practice theories.