(Ebook) We Built Reality : How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power by Jason Blakely ISBN 9780190087371, 9780190087388, 9780190087395, 9780190087401, 9780190087418, 0190087374, 0190087382, 0190087390, 0190087404

(Ebook) We Built Reality : How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power by Jason Blakely ISBN 9780190087371, 9780190087388, 9780190087395, 9780190087401, 9780190087418, 0190087374, 0190087382, 0190087390, 0190087404

Indeed, the pages of this book show that social science has played an important role in creating new ethical, political, and ideological meanings. Contemporary social science is a veritable factory of meanings, every bit as dynamic, poetical, and fecund as a creative writing department. Contemporary social science has also helped spread the scientism that now dominates many of our most powerful institutions and even the minutiae of our personal lives. These themes shape the central thesis of this book: that social science rarely simply neutrally describes the world, but rather plays a role in constructing and shaping it. In other words, the social sciences are not like the classic natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.), in which descriptions of the world do not directly alter and reshape it. Because humans inhabit worlds of meaning, and social scientific theories are in part expressions of novel meanings, those theories can always penetrate human understanding and radically alter the very societies they seek to describe. But to see this we need to make a radical paradigm shift in how we read the genre of social science, not simply as an empirical exercise but as a form of cultural and ideological production.