I was really thrilled by Becker’s text, and it kept me reading until the end. However, in spite of the clearness of the article and the fact that it was written in a very plain and direct style, I had some difficulty in comprehending all the ideas, especially because I was not fully acquainted with terms and disciplines such as epistemology, quality and quantity research.
After some quick research, I could sum some of the terms up. Thus, epistemology is the study of the nature of knowledge and how it relates to similar notions such as truth, belief and justification. It also deals with the questions of what knowledge is, how it is acquired and what do people know. In other words, it is the study of the difference between practical and theoretical reason. That is to say, becoming acquainted with the differentiation between the idea of knowing how something works and the idea of just knowing that something is or should be a certain way.
The other important definition is, the qualitative research, as the main method of approach in social science, and therefore, the study of human behavior (it focuses at the “why” and “how”). It will therefore, give importance to detail and context, rather than gathering large random samples as the scientific or quantitative research would do (it focuses at the “what”, “where” and “when”). Surprisingly, these definitions could summarize quite well the whole article, since the bottom line deals with the justification for the social studies as an answer to the attacks from the other disciplines (scientific studies).
While scientist, among others, argue that social research does not have a stable basis, Becker states that after all, we sooner or later have to rely on social conventions and organizational facts (conform with a data or a evidence that is “good enough” although not 100% accurate). Even scientists have to keep going on in spite of knowing the data might not be completely correct, in the same way social science has to work upon the convention that a result from a poll is accurate and has no errors.
The author is open-minded and honest, by admitting the philosophy of social science also has its flaws, and that we need to listen and learn from the critiques from the others. After all, reality is something no one can fully define or grasp form an objective point of view, and that everything can be questioned. Furthermore, since no reality is fully demonstrable, there must be a certain point in which we need to agree on something and “what we agree on becomes the fact”. Moreover, we have to investigate on the premise that for any sort of research, a theory is necessary, even if we are talking about the implicit theory of knowledge.