The Problem of Scientific Knowledge in Sociology: Big Data, Representativity and Abduction
There are several aspects that link the themes of science and knowledge from a sociological perspective, and which relate our – each one of us – being a singular, unique, and unrepeatable individual to the fact that we are nonetheless necessarily part of a larger whole, of a collectivity on which we certainly depend. The first is certainly that of reasoning around the central theme of the construction of social relations: I have tackled various types and of various natures, from different angles, but it is always a question of relations. Because after all, since we are part of a complexity in perpetual movement, without relationships we would be a useless part of a whole. The second, only apparently separate from the first (but part of the same, in a symbiosis of scientific love) is that of the tools of knowledge and the technical needs of the researcher: in a single term, methodology. The two threads chase each other, intertwine and disjoin, and then necessarily intertwine again, to compose a framework of inescapable eclecticism for a sociology that must constantly come to terms with continuous reductions and re-compositions. The proposal then becomes that of an inclusive sociology, epistemologically tolerant, without any claim to be exhaustive in its space-time arguments (which, moreover, as is clear from particle physics, are themselves social constructions lacking the requirements of objectivity and truth in themselves). A sociology, however, that is open to the versatility of knowledge and the certainty of the absence of linearity in conclusions, to the awareness that there is no true paradigm that does not at the same time presuppose a possible error, and finally that the gaze, albeit fleeting, on the social world must nevertheless try to make the maximum effort to be credible, even before being plausible. While starting from an ineliminable and – perhaps – the only certainty in the necessary premises: that of the complexity, of things, of the scenarios, of the approaches required and of the analysis of the relationships between things and events.
