Sociology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Sociology is the study of social behaviour or society, including its origins, development, organization, networks, and institutions. Many sociologists aim to conduct research that may be applied directly to social policy and welfare, while others focus primarily on refining the theoretical understanding of social processes.
The Sociology Of Science Pdf Book
Can and should sociology be a science? Can and should sociology be science? Sign up to view the whole essay and download the PDF for anytime access on.
The Sociology Of Science Pdf File
Subject matter ranges from the micro- sociology level of individual agency and interaction to the macro level of systems and the social structure. As all spheres of human activity are affected by the interplay between social structure and individual agency, sociology has gradually expanded its focus to further subjects, such as health, medical, military and penalinstitutions, the Internet, education, and the role of social activity in the development of scientific knowledge. The range of social scientific methods has also expanded. Social researchers draw upon a variety of qualitative and quantitative techniques. The linguistic and cultural turns of the mid- twentieth century led to increasingly interpretative, hermeneutic, and philosophic approaches towards the analysis of society. Conversely, the end of the 1. There is often a great deal of crossover between social research, market research, and other statistical fields.
The US National Science Foundation classifies sociology as a STEM field. Social analysis has origins in the common stock of Western knowledge and philosophy, and has been carried out from as far back as the time of ancient Greek philosopher. Plato, if not before. The origin of the survey, i. Domesday Book in 1.
There is evidence of early sociology in medieval Islam. Some consider Ibn Khaldun, a 1. Arab. The Latin word: socius, . It was first coined in 1. French essayist Emmanuel- Joseph Siey.
Comte endeavoured to unify history, psychology and economics through the scientific understanding of the social realm. Writing shortly after the malaise of the French Revolution, he proposed that social ills could be remedied through sociological positivism, an epistemological approach outlined in The Course in Positive Philosophy (1. Comte believed a positivist stage would mark the final era, after conjectural theological and metaphysical phases, in the progression of human understanding. To say this is certainly not to claim that French sociologists such as Durkheim were devoted disciples of the high priest of positivism. But by insisting on the irreducibility of each of his basic sciences to the particular science of sciences which it presupposed in the hierarchy and by emphasizing the nature of sociology as the scientific study of social phenomena Comte put sociology on the map.
But Comte's clear recognition of sociology as a particular science, with a character of its own, justified Durkheim in regarding him as the father or founder of this science, in spite of the fact that Durkheim did not accept the idea of the three states and criticized Comte's approach to sociology. Marx rejected Comtean positivism. For Isaiah Berlin, Marx may be regarded as the .
The sociological treatment of historical and moral problems, which Comte and after him, Spencer and Taine, had discussed and mapped, became a precise and concrete study only when the attack of militant Marxism made its conclusions a burning issue, and so made the search for evidence more zealous and the attention to method more intense. It is estimated that he sold one million books in his lifetime, far more than any other sociologist at the time. So strong was his influence that many other 1. Durkheim's Division of Labour in Society is to a large extent an extended debate with Spencer from whose sociology, many commentators now agree, Durkheim borrowed extensively. While Marxian ideas defined one strand of sociology, Spencer was a critic of socialism as well as strong advocate for a laissez- faire style of government. His ideas were highly observed by conservative political circles, especially in the United States and England.
While Durkheim rejected much of the detail of Comte's philosophy, he retained and refined its method, maintaining that the social sciences are a logical continuation of the natural ones into the realm of human activity, and insisting that they may retain the same objectivity, rationalism, and approach to causality. Suicide is a case study of variations in suicide rates among Catholic and Protestant populations, and served to distinguish sociological analysis from psychology or philosophy. It also marked a major contribution to the theoretical concept of structural functionalism. By carefully examining suicide statistics in different police districts, he attempted to demonstrate that Catholic communities have a lower suicide rate than that of Protestants, something he attributed to social (as opposed to individual or psychological) causes.
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He developed the notion of objective sui generis . By the turn of the 2. Anglo- Saxon world. Few early sociologists were confined strictly to the subject, interacting also with economics, jurisprudence, psychology and philosophy, with theories being appropriated in a variety of different fields. Since its inception, sociological epistemology, methods, and frames of inquiry, have significantly expanded and diverged. Du Bois, Vilfredo Pareto, Alexis de Tocqueville, Werner Sombart, Thorstein Veblen, Ferdinand T. Curricula also may include Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Marianne Weber and Friedrich Engels as founders of the feminist tradition in sociology.
Each key figure is associated with a particular theoretical perspective and orientation. Together the works of these great classical sociologists suggest what Giddens has recently described as 'a multidimensional view of institutions of modernity' and which emphasises not only capitalism and industrialism as key institutions of modernity, but also 'surveillance' (meaning 'control of information and social supervision') and 'military power' (control of the means of violence in the context of the industrialisation of war).?
Capitalism at the End of the Twentieth Century 1. Positivism and anti- positivism. An emphasis on empiricism and the scientific method is sought to provide a tested foundation for sociological research based on the assumption that the only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge, and that such knowledge can only arrive by positive affirmation through scientific methodology. Our main goal is to extend scientific rationalism to human conduct.. What has been called our positivism is but a consequence of this rationalism.
The extent of antipositivist criticism has also diverged, with many rejecting the scientific method and others only seeking to amend it to reflect 2. However, positivism (broadly understood as a scientific approach to the study of society) remains dominant in contemporary sociology, especially in the United States.
Durkheim maintained that the social sciences are a logical continuation of the natural ones into the realm of human activity, and insisted that they should retain the same objectivity, rationalism, and approach to causality. This approach eschews epistemological and metaphysical concerns (such as the nature of social facts) in favour of methodological clarity, replicability, reliability and validity. Since it carries no explicit philosophical commitment, its practitioners may not belong to any particular school of thought. Modern sociology of this type is often credited to Paul Lazarsfeld. This approach lends itself to what Robert K. Merton called middle- range theory: abstract statements that generalize from segregated hypotheses and empirical regularities rather than starting with an abstract idea of a social whole. Early hermeneuticians such as Wilhelm Dilthey pioneered the distinction between natural and social science ('Geisteswissenschaft').
Various neo- Kantian philosophers, phenomenologists and human scientists further theorized how the analysis of the social world differs to that of the natural world due to the irreducibly complex aspects of human society, culture, and being. Max Weber argued that sociology may be loosely described as a science as it is able to identify causal relationships of human . Fellow German sociologist, Ferdinand T.
By 'action' in this definition is meant the human behaviour when and to the extent that the agent or agents see it as subjectively meaningful .. In neither case is the 'meaning' to be thought of as somehow objectively 'correct' or 'true' by some metaphysical criterion.
Sociology of Science Sociology of. Qualitative Sociology Review.
This is the difference between the empirical sciences of action, such as sociology and history, and any kind of prior discipline, such as jurisprudence, logic, ethics, or aesthetics whose aim is to extract from their subject- matter 'correct' or 'valid' meaning. Relatively isolated from the sociological academy throughout his lifetime, Simmel presented idiosyncratic analyses of modernity more reminiscent of the phenomenological and existential writers than of Comte or Durkheim, paying particular concern to the forms of, and possibilities for, social individuality. The antagonism represents the most modern form of the conflict which primitive man must carry on with nature for his own bodily existence. The eighteenth century may have called for liberation from all the ties which grew up historically in politics, in religion, in morality and in economics in order to permit the original natural virtue of man, which is equal in everyone, to develop without inhibition; the nineteenth century may have sought to promote, in addition to man's freedom, his individuality (which is connected with the division of labor) and his achievements which make him unique and indispensable but which at the same time make him so much the more dependent on the complementary activity of others; Nietssche may have seen the relentless struggle of the individual as the prerequisite for his full development, while socialism found the same thing in the suppression of all competition .
Is Sociology a science? In order to determine whether or not sociology can be accepted as a true science it is useful to make comparisons between the studies performed by both sociologists and natural scientists on their subjects of society and the natural world respectively. At its most fundamental level, the philosophy behind knowledge, reality and being must also be scrutinized as the knowledge which is so eagerly pursued by scientists is only relevant under certain philosophical conditions. The natural world can be accepted as what can be sensed and has matter. Scientists study the natural world using an empirical, experimental and factual approach. They investigate and analyse the workings of nature before testing each conclusion.
A biologist can study the nucleus of a cell because it can be seen with a microscope and experiments show it to exist. A chemist can study hydrogen because it can be sensed through it's reactions with other chemicals. A physicist can study electricity because it can be seen to exist by lighting a bulb. They study these things in the pursuit of knowledge. Society is different from the natural world in that it is not a 'thing' with physical existence that can be investigated with our senses. Society consists of groupings of humans, and its study looks at the way these groupings behave.
When a sociologist studies society they look at behaviour and the mind. Behaviour and the mind do not take physical form like an atom does, and so it can be argued that they do not exist, and so cannot be studied scientifically. Or perhaps they do exist as chemicals inside the physical entity that is the brain, and so can be studied scientifically like any other matter. With science, one of the main aims in seeking the 'facts' is keeping a high level of objectivity so that those facts which are sought are the same for all scientists, independent of their subjective inclinations. This objectivity would seem fairly simply, say, with study of inanimate objects. However, sociologists study people and people don't necessarily behave like inanimate objects - they may, for example, react differently to varying interviewing styles used in social research. Given a questionnaire, an interviewer may put particular emphasis on a certain answer in that questionnaire to encourage the respondent to give that answer.
A level of bias is hence created, whilst such bias is perhaps far more difficult to leverage in the study of the natural world. If an expert natural scientists proclaims that . Any number of scientists could conduct a similar study and would return the same empirical result, giving additional experimental proof and backing to the first scientists study. A sociologist has a far greater struggle in their line of study, as the majority of result they may conclude will be difficult to prove and replicate in further studies. But whatever results are collected by both the sociologist and the natural scientists, any objectivity found is still subject to our philosophical understanding of reality, conditioned by the society and time in which we have come to live.
An understanding of what reality actually is is crucial. Philosophically there are two main camps on epistemology - there are the idealists, and there are the materialists. Idealists (such as Plato and Hegel of the past) see every material thing having been created by a powerful God or spirit, and ideas govern the material world. Conversely, materialists see matter as primary, and ideas and the mind are a product of the matter in the brain. Most people believe that they have have 'free- will' - they can think for themselves, as an individual, independent of anything else of matter. However, this belief requires idealism in one's philosophy, yet modern science relies on a purely materialistic philosophy.
Materialists would argue that any level of perceived free- will is not free- will and ideas are . The 'facts' are sought after, things are dealt with separately and statically, rather than in connection and in their movement.
To some, however, this is sheer reductionism, and results in many contradictions which are ignored. Everything is reduced to just characteristics and functions. Marx and Engels found metaphysics as too limited in its scope to explain the laws governing human society and thought.
They worked together to develop the method of dialectic materialism so that it could be used scientifically in relation to society. Using dialectics, society is understood not as superficial changes and existing in the now, but in its historical development and as an entity existing throughout human history which is undergoing organic developmental change. Under a dialectic philosophy, today's societies are seen as the result of a process of historical development. The one does not contradict the other, but compliments it.
However, the truer, more complete approximation of reality is contained in the movie. Their approach to dialectics was a development of the philosophical theory of Hegel, although they were the first to develop this theory in scientific terms, as was documented in Engels' Anti- D. Positivism shares many similarities to the empirical research methods employed by scientists, most notably in its objective attention to detail in the collection of data.
In keeping objectivity, positivists can only study that which can be seen, measured and observed with the purpose of discovering what causes things to happen. Interpretivism (and behaviourism) opposes positivism, focusing on action theory. Human behaviour is taken to be meaningful and worthy of study beyond empiricism as it is far more than that. Interpretivists see ideas, thought and mind as mere social and mental constructs, so we cannot fully understand the world because we take our own individual view points to what is happening. Durkheim was a positivist - he thought it both possible and desirable for sociologists to be able to establish laws of human behaviour.
In his study of suicide, Durkheim found it to be the product of social forces external to the individual. People's behaviour is seen to be governed by external stimuli, and their ideas and feelings are irrelevant. As a result, the behaviour can be objectively rather than subjectively observed and measured, similar to how a scientist observes and measures the natural world. Interpretivists or anti- positivists suggest people people apply meaning to the world, and so sociology should not even try to be scientific. Human behaviour is taken to be meaningful and so cannot be understood in the same way as natural phenomena can be. In metaphysics, a tree is a tree, there is not meaning for it being a tree, it just is. Human thoughts and ideas aren't just thoughts and ideas, they have meaning.
If someone is to commit suicide then there is a meaning for them to do that. Whilst the actions of 1. September 2. 00. 1 are seen by most as an act of terrorism, to those committing the acts they most likely had an entirely different meaning. Likewise, the war on terrorism can be given contradicting meanings by different individuals and societies. To an interpretivist, reality is too complicated for numbers and quantitative analysis to be made. Qualitative methods are essential for a full understanding of social reality. Scientific objectivity cannot be upheld using these qualitative methods which require a level of subjective thought.
Underlying everything is a problem of ontology. What makes something real? What makes an apple any more real than slavery? And what exactly is an apple - where does it begin, where does it end, where does it exist?
Metaphysically the apple is that 'thing' that can be touched and sensed. Dialectically it isn't that easy - it's always changing, always flowing, can never be defined. Idealistically the apple is what one believes to be an apple, and that may only be a figment of one's imagination. The apple may just be a chemical reaction experienced in sensing it. By thinking dialectically slavery exists in the same way that an apple does, and can be explained equally scientifically, but using different scientific methods to those currently employed. In metaphysics everything must be objectively quantified to be scientific, but it may not always be possible - may never be possible. Valid knowledge is subjective.
A basic mathematical equality is that '1 + 1 = 2', and that the result can not possibly be anything other than 2. However here it can simply and swiftly be disproved - take two drinks, add them both together and you have one drink - '1 + 1 = 1'. Similar reasoning can be taken further to show that the sum is never equal to two as to do so would involve making subjective definitions. So what is a 'fact' and a 'truth' that science is so intent on discovering, when one of the most basic mathematical principles on which science is based can be so easily disproved? Scientific method can be subjective and ambiguous, as Michael D. Sofka (1. 99. 7) writes: .
The truth is, we do not have a good description of what scientists actually do, and we are not even close to universally prescriptions for what they should be doing. Differences begin to arise in the use of this knowledge. Knowledge of the natural world has many and varied uses: medicinal healing; computational devices; weapons of mass destruction. The list is endless and always growing as new discoveries are made.
A problem arises in assessing the uses of a knowledge of society in that it doesn't manifest itself in physical form. With knowledge of society one can't make a toaster, for example.
Nor can one make a society. The use is that enables people to understand why people do things, what makes them behave in certain ways. Proving whether this knowledge is true is difficult to demonstrate. With natural science, a toaster can be built, and if it works, then the science behind the toaster is believed to be objective and true.