(And it is always something nice to see your own name printed. Today he came out -finally and after a couple of years – the book of methodology with my poor articulito on quantitative data analysis*)
Well, the point of this brief post: The sociogía is not, it should not be, the discipline that discusses anything from social influences; it is, or should be, the discipline that explains things social. I think that we can blame Durkheim when, wanting to install the discipline, wrote The Suicide. That is, at the same time, the most boring of texts, and that start all the logic that the discipline depends on to say that everything is caused by the social. That, apart from being dubious in itself, or is the point: There is an interesting phenomenon to explain and describe: the society, social interactions. But it seems that we are never interested in truth.
(* As I think I’ve commented several times during this day: “I’m concerned about. One of my few publications on methodology. I do a course on methodology. Hire Me as an ‘expert statistician’ or ‘methodological’. And I don’t even like, as such, the topic. For a long time I think that the methodology has no meaning apart from the specific issues; and since about ten years I think that the way in which we pass statistics for sociologists, which is basically to know how to use SPSS, it does not imply that one knows nothing, but nothing, of statistics. Be hired as a ‘statistical’ when hardly ask for a few data analysis and understanding the outputs is very, but very rare. In any case, something I have to do before you get permanently stuck like metodológo).