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A Poetic for Sociology

Toward a Logic of Discovery for the Human Sciences

Richard Harvey Brown author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:The University of Chicago Press

Published:1st Apr '89

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

A Poetic for Sociology cover

For too long, argues Richard Harvey Brown, social scientists have felt forced to choose between imitating science's empirical methodology and impersonating a romantic notion of art, the methods of which are seen as primarily a matter of intuition, interpretation, and opinion. Developing the idea of a "cognitive aesthetic," Brown shows how both science and art—as well as the human studies that stand between them—depend on metaphoric thinking as their "logic of discovery" and may be assessed in terms of such aesthetic criteria of adequacy as economy, elegance, originality, scope, congruence, and form.

By recognizing this "aesthetic" common ground between science and art, Brown demonstrates that a fusion can be achieved within the human sciences of these two principal ideals of knowledge—the scientific or positivist one and the artistic or intuitive one. A path, then, is opened for creating a knowledge of ourselves and society which is at once objective and subjective, at once valid scientifically and significantly humane.

ISBN: 9780226076195

Dimensions: 23mm x 15mm x 2mm

Weight: 425g

318 pages