ABSTRACT
In Invitation to sociology, Peter Berger described the sociological con sciousness as characterized by debunking, unrespectability, relativizing, and cosmopolitan qualities (1963: 52). Berger influenced generations of sociologists with his view that the goal of sociology was to look beneath taken-for-granted assumptions, to debunk them, and lay bare the processes of social construction (1963: 38). He portrayed sociology as a tool for this debunking, and told us how difficult the work can be. “How can I be sure, say, of sociological analysis of American middle-class mores in view of the fact that the categories I use for this analysis are conditioned by historically relative forms of thought. ♦. ?” Although Berger and Luckmann described this epistemological problem with a wonderful metaphor — they say that studying one’s own culture is like “trying to push the bus in which one is riding” — at the same time, they argued for the separation of epistemology from “the empirical discipline of sociology” (1967: 13). They wanted to build a sociology of knowledge that concerns itself with common sense knowledge, that is, what everyday people know as “reality” in their daily lives (1967:15).
