Andreas Glaeser                                          

Political epistemology

      My research on knowledge and understandings has a number of interacting dimensions. My most recent contribution to this set of themes can be found in the introduction and the theoretical chapters of Political Epistemics (for sample chapters click HERE

 

My research has led me to the delineation of a political epistemology as a field of study. It’s task (at least as I understand it) is the analysis of knowledge formation in processes of institutionalization and deinstitutionalization. Theoretically and methodologically this has involved three major steps.

 

I.  Reformulation the sociology of knowledge as a process oriented sociology of understanding. There are several reasons why this move appears opportune:

• The term understanding is a continuous signaling an ongoing process;
• We need a theory which is able to integrate various modes of understanding–we know discursively, but also emotively and kinesthetically (to say nothing of the sensory modes). More these modes produce our worlds in their own ways leading to possible contradictions.
• Understanding comes in degrees of validity. “Knowledge” comes already with the qualification that it is in fact reliable, highly validated understanding. However, the movement of understandings from “hunch” to “hypothesis” to “knowledge” to “unquestionable background” and back to “doubted” and “rejected” is of particular importance in social change.

 

II. Development of a theory of validation as a core component of the sociology of understanding. Precisely for the reason just mentioned the phenomenon of validation and the various forms in which it appears is particularly important. Major forms of validation are:

• Recognition–through the agreement with other people;
• Corroboration–through the success of action guided by a particular understanding; and finally
• Resonance–through agreement with other understandings.

 

III. Development of  a hermeneutic (or understanding based), dialectical theory of institutions. Since understandings orient and direct actions, while actions in their regularized concatenation with others’ actions form institutions, the life and death of institutions can be analyzed fruitfully by studying changes in institutions. This is the core idea behind my analysis of socialism’s decline (page is HERE). These changes are typically brought about by changing valildations which are in turn mediated by institutional environments (recognitions for example are dispensed in networks of authority). Hence, understandings and institutions can be analyzed as dialectically related to each other.

 

 

If the inside of heads was only always as easily accessible as made possible here by Niki de Saint Phalle....