Trouble dans l'épistémologie

Sociologists (and more generally social scientists) committed to demonstrate that their disciplines are part of a fully-fledged scientific activity, are regularly led to denounce some of their colleagues on the pretext that they would fail to comply with epistemological rules which alone allow the production of a scholar knowledge. A Bachelardian epistemology, advocating a break with ordinary knowledge and the use of reason in order to obtain an objective understanding of the world, which is usually summoned by sociologists, suggests here that it is rather a conception valuing the “disorder” in all its dimensions that makes it possible to approach the social world scientifically. To the “truth” of Science, the researcher wins to substitute the “disorder” of experience.