On High and Low in Society and in Sociology. A Semantic Approach to Social Stratification

Samenvatting

On High and Low in Society and in Sociology. A Semantic Approach to Social Stratification. The vocabulary of sociology is derived from the vocabulary of "naive" social discourse. The concept of social stratification serves as an example. The concept implies an image of "high and low", taken from everyday speech. The meanings of the high-low metaphor are shown to be more ambiguous and complex than present sociological literature suggests. It is argued that sociologists, in their attempts to be "scientific", have tended to overemphasize problems of formal theory and statistical models, and to neglect to inquire into the semantic world of which both their subjects and they themselves form a part. A plea is made for semantic analysis as a sociological method.