Criticism
While prominent sociologists such as Randall Collins, Karen A. Cerulo, David Sciulli, and Jonathan H. Turner have praised aspects of pure sociology, the approach has also been criticized. Kam C. Wong criticizes pure sociology’s scientism, David F. Greenberg its use of covering-law explanations, and Thomas J. Scheff its attempt at disciplinary purity. In a 2008 symposium, Douglas A. Marshall offers an extended critique of the system. Marshall argues that, contrary to Black’s stated goal of making sociology more scientific, his approach is actually antithetical to modern scientific values and practices—a theme reiterated by Stephen Turner in the same symposium.
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Homoeopathy is insignificant as an art of healing, but of great value as criticism on the hygeia or medical practice of the time.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)