사회를 담고 있는 글쓰기, 사회를 만들어 내는 글 읽기 = Writing holding society, reading reconstructing society

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper aims to discover how social science has interacted with ‘reading’ in the middle of its development. As a slow starter compared with humanities and natural science, modern social science has grown up using the two methodological traditions - positivism and hermeneutics. Positivism insists on methodological monism, which emphasizes importing methodology from natural science. Hermeneutics persists in social science using more appropriate methodology for itself, because social phenomena are absolutely different from natural ones. These two traditions have refined themselves alternately in the face of criticism of the opposite. So the quantity and the quality of the writing in social science have been elevated in the process. The writings of social science from the traditions have two aspects. On the one hand, writings and reading of social science are dependent variables of social development. As social science develops, prescriptive demand as well as descriptive condition of society and state are included into the writings of social science. In this case, social science has a gap between the elite and the public. On the other hand, writings and reading of social science herald social development. The literacy of the public equipped with the social scientific literature was the one of backgrounds of social changes. Writing and reading also played important roles in the development of social science in Korea. At first, social science in Korea, leaning toward the Western and the elites, has kept a distance from the public. Afterwards there started efforts to write originally and read independently in the academic field of social science since 1980`s. Without those efforts, Korea could not have solved domestic problems and advanced the level of democracy. It is necessary that both the elite and the public must write and read and hold in common their own (Korean) issues and narratives in public spheres including academic journals for the sake of widespread development of social science in Korea. Especially, the public have to do their best to write and read with autonomy for the purpose. That`s the momentum that public can be significant independent variables, not merely trivial dependent ones, in the development of social science.