Can sociology be value free?
It tries really, really hard to be. But ethnocentrism is extremely hard to avoid. All sociological studies have to be approved through an Institutional Review Board before they can be carried out. If a sociologist’s proposal seems value-laden (or if there are strong expectations or biases from the researcher), it will not be approved. Peter Berger (in conjunction with Thomas Luckmann) wrote a hyper-relativist book called The Social Construction of Reality in the 1960’s, and it is the most value-free sociological perspective/theory that I’ve ever come across. You might like it. He talks about the “sociology of knowledge” and the SES/gender/whatever status of an individual will influence his/her perception of reality. He says that mythology, theology, and science are just different ways of means of maintaining one’s cultural universe, but he doesn’t believe there is any matter in which one is a better method. I wish I were as open as him.
