WHAT DO 'WE' KNOW THAT 'THEY' DON'T? SOCIOLOGISTS' VERSUS NONSOCIOLOGISTS' KNOWLEDGE

This paper clarifies and repositions some of the controversies generated by Burawoy's defense of public sociology and his vision of the mutually stimulating relationship between the different forms of sociology. Before arguing if, why, and how, sociology should or could be more "public," it is useful to reflect upon what we think we, as sociologists, know that "lay people" do not. This paper thus explores the public sociology debate's epistemological core, the issue of the relationship between sociologists' and nonsociologists' knowledge of the social world. Four positions regarding the status of sociologists' knowledge versus lay people's knowledge are explored: superiority (sociologists' knowledge of the social world is more accurate, objective, and reflexive than lay people's knowledge, thanks to science's methods and norms); homology (explicit lay theories about the social world often parallel social scientists' theories); complementarity (lay people's and social scientists' knowledge complement one another; the former's local, embedded knowledge is essential to the latter's general, disembedded knowledge); and circularity (sociologists' knowledge continuously infuses commonsensical knowledge, and scientific knowledge about the social world is itself rooted in common sense knowledge; each form of knowledge feeds the other). For each of these positions, implications are drawn regarding the terms, possibilities, and conditions of a dialogue between sociologists and their publics, especially if we take the circularity thesis seriously. Conclusions point to the accountability we face towards the people we study, and to the idea that sociology is always performative, a point that has, to some extent, been obscured by Burawoy's distinctions between professional, critical, policy, and public sociologies.