Soc As A Science

• Empiricism

  knowledge gained from actually experiencing and / or observing something.
• objectivity

  where the research does not involve opinions, or bias or prejudice.
• To come up with empirical knowledge, experiments are carried out to test relationships between variables.

  Theories and laws that are tested over and over again by replication become accepted as scientific knowledge.
• Comte

  It’s possible to discover the laws that control and shape the behaviour of people in society.
• Comte

  Science isn’t there to tell us why something came into being.

  Science is there to explain how things relate to each other, using laws. So, Asian lads and the Police don’t relate well because of a social fact called racism.
• Comte

  The main task of Sociology is to discover general laws of social development;

  i)Laws of co-existence: looking at the relationship between parts of society;ii)Laws of succession: what are the laws that govern social change? 
• Inductive Logic

  Inductive Logic is a big part of Positivism...

  Inductive logic is a type of reasoning about something that involves moving from a set of specific facts to a general conclusion.
• Durkheim thought Comte had failed to establish Sociology as a science.

  Durkheim thought, instead, that Sociology should study social facts as things to observe and measure. So, things like the suicide rate.
• Karl Marx thought Sociology should be a science because of his economic focusKarl Popper thought that all academic subject areas that wanted to be called a ‘science’ should subject themselves to a process of falsification.To test itself, therefore, Sociology must come up with testable hypotheses, such as; suicide is caused by insufficient regulation and integrationKarl Popper rejected Marxism as a pseudo-science, because its concepts, such as false class consciousness, were too abstract to be seen and measured. 
• Deductive Method

  Then the theory is bombarded with challenges to its hypothesis in order to see if it stands up to its claims.
• Inducive Method

  Then the theory finds loads of evidence to prove itself to be right.
• Interpretivism is THE alternative, THE total opposite of Positivism.

  People like Weber say Sociology should study society from the perspective of other people to understand how and why things happen.
• Using Weber’s perspective of verstehen requires subjective understanding which draws on people’s opinions.

  Science is strongly objective and does not allow opinion to influence research.

  For this reason, Interpretivists argue Sociology cannot ever be a science.
• Kuhn looked at the history of the natural sciences and argued that it’s not simply an accumulation of knowledge that ends up being the credible academic body we know as science, but that it went through a series of paradigm shifts or revolutions .
• Pre-science: period of discovery where there was no central paradigm.-Normal science: where scientists used an established paradigm, like the theory of evolution, to support theories-Revolutionary science: where the paradigms are challenged.
• Khun

  Sociology behaves like it’s in the pre-science stage: there’s no dominant perspective and there are lots of competing theories and perspectives.

  It’s totally valid to refer to Sociology as a young science that still needs to find its unifying theory.