Abstract

Fillieule offers a historical and theoretical account of the field of sociology of knowledge from the viewpoint of methodological individualism. His focus is on collective beliefs and this chapter begins by illustrating the ability of methodological individualism to explain them. The successive paradigms in sociology of knowledge are then reviewed: the “classical” paradigm and the Marxist concept of false consciousness, the “modern” paradigm that seeks to explain scientific knowledge by social factors only, and the “cognitive” paradigm that analyzes the “good reasons” for an actor in a given social context to adhere to a belief. This “cognitive” approach initiated by Boudon in the mid-1980s successfully applies methodological individualism in the field of sociology of knowledge and does not suffer from the lack of explanatory power and problems of self-refutation that plague the previous paradigms.