Journal Article — Working Outlines for the Sociology of Self-Knowledge — by Mohammad H. Tamdgidi

In this working paper I present an outline for a sociology of self-knowledge concerned with the study of how the investigator’s own self-knowledges and worldhistorical social structures constitute one another. The outline is built upon critical assimilation of contributions made in three seemingly independent traditions in sociology: 1-Sociology of Knowledge; 2-Social Psychology (broadly defined); and 3-World-Systems/Historical Studies. The sociology of self-knowledge as a sub-field of inquiry in the sociology of knowledge extends the exercise of the sociological imagination in both directions in terms of the study of how the investigator’s own selfknowledges and world-historical social structures constitute one another. In the process, adopting a postdeterminist dialectical method, it also abandons a prior and reductivist approaches to the dialectics of self and society, knowledge and social existence, individual and social context.