Are the natural sciences scientific?

• natural sciences empiricism

  Bacon

  emphasises the importance of empiricism - knowledge which was to be built up from what we can test with our senses

  the building up of knowledge
• natural sciences

  Burrell and Morgan

  • Ontology: science favours a realist conception of the social world. Realism assumes object have an independence existence and are not dependent on the knower of their existence
  • Epistemology: science advocates the use of positivists assumptions of knowledge - involves assumption that knowledge is concrete, objective and requires the researcher to adopt an observer role
  • Human nature: Science assumes a deterministic position - humans respond in a mechanistic fashion to their environment. human beings and their experiences are conditioned by their environment and circumstances
  • Methodology: science advocates an objective approach to the social world
• natural sciences

  Comte

  argued the science of society was possible and that laws would be discovered through the application of rational scientific procedure
• natural sciences

  Popper

  1. the evidence of a fixed pattern of social development is very weak
  2. the idea of predicting accurately how society will develop is easily demonstrated t be false - we cannot know what will be invented in the future
• natural sciences falsification

  Popper

  it is not enough for experiments to verify a particular hypothesis

  argues some sociology fails to use falsification - Marx predicts a proletarian revolution but it has not happened yet because of false class consciousness - prediction can't be falsified because we can't look into the future
• natural sciences falsification

  Popper

  the longer a theory has stood the test of time, the more often researcher have failed to falsify it, the closer it is likely to be the truth
• natural sciences paradigm

  Kuhn

  paradigm is a particular and accepted set of thoughts and assumptions about the way things and research should be done

  sociology is not a mainstream science because sociologists don't share a set of assumptions around the world
• natural sciences open and closed systems

  Keat and Urry

  stress the similarities between sociology and certain kinds of natural science in terms of the degree of control the researcher has over the variables being researched
• natural sciences realism

  Keat and Urry

  argues science often assumes the existence of unobservable structures - physicists cannot directly observe the interior of a black hole

  in realist view this means interpretivists are wrong in assuming sociology cannot be scientific