Explore "The Sociological Imagination" by C. Wright Mills on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Every way of working on social studies, every choice of studies and of the methods of studying them, implies ‘a theory of scientific progress. ' Everyone, I suppose, agrees that scientific advance is cumulative: that it is not the creation of one man but the work of many men revising and criticizing, adding to and subtracting from one another's efforts. For one's own work to count, one must relate it to what has been done before and to other work currently in progress. This is needed in order to communicate, and it is needed for ‘objectivity. ' One must state what one has done in such a way that others may check it.
The policy for progress of abstracted empiricists is very specific and quite hopeful: Let us accumulate many microscopic studies; slowly and minutely, like ants dragging many small crumbs into a great pile, we shall ‘build up the science.'