ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book focuses on the social bases of knowledge-differentiation intentionally replaces one of the traditional props of a speculative, politically orientated sociology of knowledge: the reduction of validation to the level of an evaluative presupposition based in the social position, usually in class-terms, of the thinker. It also talks about Lukacs, the Frankfurt school, and Goldmann, science comes to be portrayed as part and parcel of the reificatory processes of modern society, and a distortion of reality in itself. Within the Marxist paradigm the problem of adequate analysis and conceptualization of the processes of knowledge-differentiation get hypostatized into a valid-invalid, scientific-ideological dichotomization based on the economic stratification of society, and not on the stratification of knowledge itself. The way ahead for the sociology of knowledge lies not in its attempts at theoretical integration, but in its attempts at systematization of methodology.
