Sociology as a science

• Sociology


  Coined by Comte, a positivist who believed we can apply the logic/methods of natural sciences to society to give us objective knowledge to help solve social problems
• Positivists


  • Favour macro/structural explanations of society, like functionalism and Marxism, as they see society/its structures as social facts that shape our behaviour patterns
• Positivist approach


  1. Observe patterns

  2. Identify patterns

  3. Measure patterns

  4. Explain patterns using inductive reasoning to discover laws that determine how society works
• Verificationism


  Inductive reasoning claims to verify a theory, allowing positivists to explain a social 'fact' in terms of another and produce statements about how society works to predict future events and guide social policies
• Positivist research


  • Adopt the research process of natural scientists, using quantitative data to find and measure patterns of behaviour to discover laws of cause-and-effect relationships that determine behaviour
  • Researchers should be detached and objective, not allowing their own subjective values to influence the research/analysis
• Durkheim (1897) studied suicide to show that sociology was a science with its own distinct subject matter, using quantitative data from official stats to find patterns and conclude that levels of integration and regulation were the social facts responsible
• Interpretivists


  Don't believe sociology is a science, nor should it try to be, as they criticise positivism as being inadequate for the study of human beings
• Interpretivist view of sociology


  • The subject matter is meaningful social action, which can only be understood by successfully interpreting the meanings/motives of actors involved
  • Sociology isn't a science because it deals with human meanings, not laws of cause and effect - our actions are based on interpreting stimuli and choosing how to respond, not an automatic reaction
• Verstehen


  Putting ourselves in the other's shoes to understand their meanings
• Interpretivist research


  • Reject quantitative methods, using qualitative methods like unstructured interviews, personal documents and participant observations to see the world from the subject's viewpoint
• Douglas (1967) rejects the positivist view that external social facts determine our behaviour, and instead argues that individuals have free will and actions are based on meanings, so we have to uncover the meanings of those involved to understand suicide
• Types of interpretivism


  • Interactionalists
  • Phenomenologists
  • Ethnomethologists
• Interactionalists


  • Believe we can have casual explanations instead of the positivist approach of a definite hypothesis before starting research, taking a bottom-up approach of having ideas through the research itself rather than a fixed hypothesis
• Phenomenologists & ethnomethologists


  • Completely reject the possibility of casual explanations of human behaviour, taking the anti-structuralist approach that says society isn't a real thing that determines our actions, and that social reality is simply the shared meanings/knowledge of its members
• Postmodernists, feminists & scientific sociology

  • Postmodernists do not believe that sociology is a science, as they see science as a metanarrative (big story) and no more valid than other accounts of the world, rejecting the idea that scientific sociology makes false claims about the truth and excludes other theories
  • Poststructuralist feminists agree, arguing a dominant, scientific feminism excludes many groups of women, and some argue quantitative methods are oppressive and don't actually portray women's experiences
• Fallacy of induction


  Verification ignores that new evidence can come in at any time and prove a theory wrong
• Falsification


  The opposite of verificationism - a scientific statement is capable of being proved wrong via evidence, so a good theory is one that is falsifiable in principle but stands up to all attempts to disprove it
• Popper argues sociology isn't a science because its theories can't undergo falsification, but some sociology can be falsified, which opens the debate back up as to whether it's a science
• (Khun)Paradigm


  The norms and values of a scientific group, such as physicists, that define what the science is and provide a framework of assumptions, principles and methods that researchers use/work around
• Scientific revolutions


  Overtime, science has undergone paradigm shifts, where old central ideas are replaced by new ones, going through pre-science (discovery period with no central paradigm), normal science (established paradigm supports theories), and revolutionary science (paradigm is challenged/replaced, normal science continues)
• Sociology is pre-paradigmatic, therefore pre-scientific, as it has no shared paradigm/dominant perspective, and cannot be a science until there is one
• Postmodernists argue that a paradigm isn't desirable anyway because it's essentially a metanarrative that silences minority views
• Realists


  • Argue science studies both observable phenomena and underlying unobservable structures, which would technically make Marxism and interpretivism scientific