The Sociology of Nonknowledge: A Paradigm

The article presents information on the sociology of knowledge. Since the mid-19th century, the sociology of knowledge has been one of the central foci for social analysis. The sociology of knowledge, although expressed in many diverse forms, relates cognitions to other factors in the social and/or cultural milieu. Holding such cognitions relative to these factors, sociologists of knowledge argue that beliefs about social situations are not homogeneously distributed throughout complex societies. This tends to imply that people are not fully aware of the spectrum of opinion or knowledge about their society. The ground of an independent sociology of knowledge is the human process of symbolization-the act of adding meaningful perspectives to experience. The resultant is the exclusion from awareness of a possible perspective or deprivation of symbolic understanding within a single interpretation. Perhaps the most significant advance to be made in the study of social knowledge and non-knowledge is the recognition that neither need-grounded nor possibility-grounded interpretations are sufficient for describing the totality of not-knowing processes. Falsification and neglect seem to be irreducible to one another. Acknowledging this will foster theoretical synthesis rather than the continuation of fruitless polemics.