| I disagree with your assessment of sociology as a discipline "filled to the brim with Humanities-Style-Thinking." Sociology uses rigorous, analytical, and quantitative methods to shine insight on the modern condition. It allows one to better understand the condition of the world, and by extension, one's place within it. And it has contributed significantly to my intellectual growth. When I've felt a lack of community in my life, for instance, Robert Putnam showed me that civic and social participation in America have systematically declined for the last six decades. When I've aspired to get into a good school or ahem a prestigious startup incubator, Robert Frank explains how concerns of status and position have a salient effect on my decision making. When I express a preference for a particular kind of music or type of food, Bordieu shows that preferences that I take for granted are in fact strongly correlated with my culture, socioeconomic background, gender, and profession. When I pay money to send a virtual gift to a friend, Baudrillard shows that I'm motivated by "sign value" rather than "use value" -- that what an object represents matters more than what it actually does. And that's just the beginning. Sociology gets a lot of criticism, perhaps because it's such a broad field. However, it has done more to shape my understanding of the world than any single other discipline, and I'm far from speaking alone. |
This is probably because sociology is one of those disciplines, and I use the term loosely, that really isn't yet close to being able to have its referents captured, chopped up, classified, quantified, analyzed and put into little boxes.
In fact, if I didn't know better, I'd say the observations you point to could have been made by your run-of-the-mill keen observer of humanity, like a Tom Wolfe or Shakespeare.