Evaluation, prescription, and political decision

pp. 145-166

in: Danilo Zolo, Reflexive epistemology, Berlin, Springer, 1989

Abstract

The paradox of the self-fulfilling (or self-defeating) prediction was, Neurath pointed out, only one element within a still wider context — that of the circular inclusion of the sociologist's work as a part itself of the subject matter of his research. Epistemological examination of the social sciences, and especially of sociology, had to take its starting point within the self-referential circle in which the social scientist's activity was itself to be analysed as 'social praxis' and in which "the scientist himself figures as one of the elements of the social picture".¹