in free-floating reality, along with the free-floating thinker-observer. But the
very concept of truth has developed within social networks, and has changed
with the history of intellectual communities. To say this is not automatically
to assert either self-doubting relativism or the non-existence of objectivity. It
is no more than a historical fact to say that we have never stepped outside of
the human thought community; and the sociology of thinking implies that we
never will step outside of it. The very notion of stepping outside is something
developed historically by particular branches within intellectual networks; so
are the polemics about the allegedly corrosive effects of a sociology of ideas.
In the Epilogue I will argue at greater length that social construction of
knowledge is realism, not anti-realism, and that it is a more secure defense of
realism than the usual methods of asserting our prejudice in favor of objective
reality.- Culture begets itself. A contemporary argument asserts the autonomy of
culture. The epithet “reductionist” is taken as a self-evident refutation of that
to which it can be applied. Yet there is no compelling evidence that culture is
autonomous, that its forms and changes are explainable only in terms of itself.
Some sociologists make the anti-reductionist argument by pointing out that
many cultural stances—ethnic consciousness, religious belief, political ideolo-
gies—are not correlated with social class and other familiar sociological vari-
ables. Culture is autonomous in the statistical sense that one cannot predict
persons’ culture from their social position. Instead, culture develops within its
own channels; French neighborhoods which have supported the revolutionary
left do so repeatedly from one historical period to the next; American upper-
middle-class professionals contained both Progressives and their opponents.
The hidden assumption here is to treat the social as if it referred to social class
and a few other variables of traditional survey research, while leaving ethnicity,
religion, ideology, and the like outside. This is a failure to think through the
experienced reality which lies behind terms such as “ethnicity” or “political
belief.” Each of these is a type of social interaction, a specific form of discourse
which has meaning for a particular social network, a set of interactions which
marks off some persons as having a particular ethnic or religious or political
identity from those who do not. Culture is not autonomous of society, because
we never know anything under this term except from describing the kinds of
things which happen in interaction. To say that culture is autonomous, that
culture explains itself, is either inaccurate or superfluous: inaccurate if culture
is defined in a fashion that excludes the social, for such culture has never
existed; superfluous if defined broadly, for in that case culture is coextensive
with the social, making cultural explanations sociological ones. At best the
metaphor of the autonomously cultural points to distinctive regions, distinctive
networks and zones of focal attention, within the social.
8 •^ Introduction