Hermeneutics, Pragmatism and Sociology: Pragmatism's Advantage.

According to French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, intellectuals are prone to substitute a scholastic relation to the social world for the practical relation people have to it: they replace the practical relation to objects by the relation an observer has to them and by their way of looking at them. When he/she replaces the active agent by the reflecting subject, and the logic of practice by a scholastic reason, the researcher doesn't realize that he/she performs an essential alteration of experience. The logic of practice can't be grasped from such a point of view. In order to seize it, Bourdieu said, we have to return to the world of everyday experience. But there are many ways for doing that. In this paper I examine two of them, through a comparison of two philosophers (Gadamer and Dewey) belonging to two different traditions (philosophical hermeneutics and pragmatism). Only Dewey seems to avoid what Bourdieu calls the "scholastic epistemocentrism". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]