Explore "The Sociological Imagination" by C. Wright Mills on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Work in social science has always been accompanied by problems of evaluation. The traditions of these sciences contain a long sequence of often dogmatic resolutions, much attempted straddling of fences, and also a number of well-reasoned and sensible views. Often the problem has not been faced directly at all but scattered answers merely assumed-or adopted-as in the applied sociology of the research technician available for hire. Such a practitioner does not, by the assumed neutrality of his techniques, escape this problem-in effect, he allows other types of men to solve it for him. But surely the intellectual craftsman will try to do his work in awareness of its assumptions and implications, not the least of which are its moral and political meaning for the society in which he works and for his role within that society.
Agreement is now wide enough to make commonplace the notion that one cannot infer judgments of value from statements of fact or from definitions of conceptions. But this does not mean that such statements and definitions are irrelevant to judgment. It is easy to see that most social issues involve a tangled-up mess of factual errors and unclear conceptions, as well as evaluative bias. Only after they have been logically untangled is it possible to know whether issues really do involve a conflict of values.