Some Thoughts on Thinking

Abstract

It can be argued that ‘thoughts’ of various kinds are already sociological data and topics of inquiry, for people’s ‘attitudes’, ‘beliefs’ and ‘opinions’ have long been probed and correlated with other things by social scientists. Leaving questions of methodological adequacy to one side, it is clear that some corpus of social-scientific knowledge-claims contains reference to the thoughts that people are supposed to have entertained about a host of matters, from the most locally specific item to the most global, historical course of events. The actual data of thoughts collected sociologically consist of spoken or written answers to questions; meaningful utterances constitute the ‘thoughts’ themselves for purposes of inquiry. Of course, the perennial question is: do these utterances represent respondents’ real thoughts about the issue at hand? Although this question sometimes takes on a metaphysical tinge, it is usually resolvable by reference to (commonsense) observation of respondents’ relevant courses of action. (Not that such connections are routinely made as a matter of empirical procedure, of course; too often we are expected to swallow claims about people’s thoughts on the basis of evidence gathered through a questionnaire or interview schedule which, if gathered without such trappings, would hardly convince an intelligent layman who knows that deeds can belie words.)