Sociology & Science

• What do positivists think?

  it is possible to apply the logic and methods of natural sciences to sociology to provide objective knowledge
• Which sociologists are positivists?

  Durkheim

  Comte
• Positivism & patterns

  for positivists reality is patterned rather than chaotic
• What did Durkheim say?

  'the real laws are discoverable' and positivists believe they can discover the laws that govern how society works
• Verificationism

  positivists need to have theories that are true, otherwise they are pointless. They need to make sure that all the evidence they have verifies their theory they have made. When it does they claim to have discovered a general 'law
• objective quantitative research

  positivists believe that as far as possible sociology should use the experimental method as a model for research as it allows hypotheses to be tested systematically

  use quantitative data to uncover patterns of behaviour and produce mathematically precise statements about relationships being investigated

  researchers should be detached and objective

  there is a danger the researcher may contaminate the research, so positivists prefer methods that allow complete detachment like questionnaires and experiments
• What did Durkheim find in his 'le suicide' study?

  claimed to have discovered a real law in his study 'le suicide' by concluding through official statistics about religion and suicide that catholicism was more integrating and so had a lower suicide rate
• What did Comte say about sociology being a science?

  it is the 'queen of the sciences
• What do interpretivists think?

  interpretivists argue that the subject matter of sociology is menaingful social action so has to be interpreted to understand the meanings and motives of people involved

  reject the natural sciences method because of the fundamental difference that people construct their world through consciousness

  individuals are autonomous beings that construct their own social world, not puppets without any control
• Which sociologists are interpretivists?

  Weber

  Mead

  Douglas

  Goffman
• What do interpretivists think about how human beings respond to stimuli?

  mead - human beings choose how they respond to stimuli rather that automatically responding in the same way each time
• Interactionist view on hypotheses

  glaser + strauss - hypotheses risk imposing our own view of what is important on research
• Phenomenologist view

  type of interpretivism - completely reject the possibility of causal explanations and argue that society isn't a real thing

  social reality is just the shared meanings or knowldge of its members so exists only in people's consciousness

  people's actions aren't governed by external forces so no causal relationship can be established
• Interpretivism & suicide

  douglas - suicide can only be understood by uncovering its meanings rather than imposing our own on the situation

  proposes the use of qualiatative data from case studies that reveal individual actors' true meanings

  atkinson - rejects the idea that external facts determine behaviour but believes we can only study the way the living make sense of the deaths
• Postmodernists & science

  postmodernists view natural sciences as purely accounts of the world rather than a single truth, so there is no reason to accept its theory

  there are as many truths as there are points of view so a scientific approach is dangerous as it claims a monopoly of the truth and disregards other views

  eg. in the soviet union marxism was used to justify coersion and oppression
• feminism & scientific sociology

  poststructuralist feminists argue that the idea of a single feminist theory is a form of domination that covertly excludes groups of women

  other feminists argue that quantitative methods are oppressive and can't capture the reality of women's experiences
• Agreements between positivists & interpretivists

  interpretivists do tend to agree with the positivist description of a natural science

  however some sociologists, philosophers and historians offer alternative views of science
• How science grows

  popper - many systems of thought claim to have true knowledge of the world such as religious and political ideologies, so he asks two questions about the emergence of science

  what distinguishes scientific knowledge from other forms of knowledge?

  why has scientific knowledge be able to grow so quickly in the last few centuries?
• the fallacy of induction

  popper - rejects the view that the distinctive feature of science is inductive reasoning because of the 'fallacy error of induction'

  famously uses the example of swans - it is easy to make the generalisation that all swans are white but it can't be proved as even one black swan completely disproves it
• falsificationism

  popper - scientific knowledge is able to be falsified (declared as false) which is what makes it unique, which means a good theory has two features

  it is falsifiable on principle but when tested stands up to all attempts to disprove it

  it claims to explain a lot - making large generalisations so it is at greater risk of being falsified
• truth

  popper - 'all knowledge is provisional, temporary and capable of being proven wrong at any moment' so there is never absolute proof that anything is true
• criticism and open society


  popper - science is a public activity as a theory must be open to criticism in order for it to be falsifiable

  science thrives in open societies that believe in free expression and the right to challenge accepted ideas

  closed societies governed by any one belief that claims an absolute truth stifle the growth of science eg. marxism or nazism
• implications for sociology

  popper - most of sociology is ultimately unscientific because it uses theories that can't be falsified because of the processes they function on

  ford - hypothesised that comprehensive schooling would produce social mixing and was able to test that
• worth of unscientific theories

  popper - unfalsifiable theories like marxism aren't worthless as they may become testable at a later date and because they can still be examined for clarity an dlogical consistency
• paradigms

  a set of definitions of a given science; a framework of assumptions, principles and methods

  kuhn - paradigms are essentially a set of norms or a kind of culture that scientists come to accept through socialisation

  a science can't exist without a shared paradigm, and without one there is purely rival schools of thought
• normal science

  kuhn - normal science involves problem-solving where paradigms provide the questions and a broad sense of the asnwers and scientists fill in the gaps

  this is an advantage as scientists agree on the basics so are able to get on with the productive aspects of science

  watkins - this contrasts with popper's view that falsification is what makes science unique
• scientific revolutions

  not all puzzle-solving is successful and scientists find anomalies that contradict with their paradigms, which means they lose confidence in that paradigm

  this places science in crisis as it loses its previously taken-for-granted foundations and causes arguments and efforts to reformulate the paradigm

  rival paradigms are created which kuhn suggests can't be compared to one another, so neither will accept criticism or accept that they are wrong
• post-scientific revolution

  eventually a new paradigm wins out over the others and is accepted by the scientific community, so the practice can resume with a different set of norms

  kuhn - this is an irrational process similar to religious conversion and generally gains support from younger scientists first because they have less to lose from the change

  contrasts with popper's view that the scientific community is open and rational
• similarities between sociology and science

  keat + urry - science and sociology share similarities because they both study systems, but there are differences in ~

  closed systems - researchers can control and measure all relevant variables to make precise predictions

  open systems - the researcher has less control over variables so can make predictions, even if they aren't as precise

  sociologists study open systems which are too complex to make precise predictions
• underlying structures

  keat + urry - science isn't necessarily purely concerned with observable processes, and often assumes the existence of things that can't be observed eg. physicists can't directly observe inside a black hole

  this means interpretivists are correct and sociology may be able to be scientific

  both natural and social sciences explain causes of events with underlying causes and structures that we can work out by observing their effects

  this means a lot of sociology can be scientific, just without controlled closed experiments