ABSTRACT
In philosophy, the concept of epistemology has been generally used to refer to the philosophical tradition of Locke and Kant, which seeks to establish the correspondence between the state of things and reasoning and conduct. In social theory, it is common to find an ambiguous conception of what the epistemological, the theoretical, and the methodological levels imply and what the relationships are between them. This chapter describes that modern epistemology is at the bottom of several of the arguments of Goffman's critics, including the assertion that his work does not amount to a sociological theory, the negation of a method underlying his analysis, the dispute about his alleged cynicism, the claim that he neglected central aspects of social life such as power, class differences, and social change, and the depreciation of the dramaturgical perspective. One of the defining traits of modern epistemology is the idea that a social or sociological theory entails the relationship between the micro and macro spheres.
