Sociology And Science Flashcards
Why does it matter if sociology is considered a science?
- Higher status. It will be seen as important just like the natural sciences. Findings will be seen as having more validity and the prestige of the subject will increase.
- Funding. The greater the status of the subject, the more likely the scientific knowledge will be taken seriously and attract more funding from government bodies and organisations to conduct further research.
Why should sociology be considered a science?
Positivism (Comte, Marx, Durkheim)
- Believe it is possible and desirable to apply the logics and methods of the natural sciences to the study of society.
- We can achieve objective knowledge of the same type found in the natural sciences.
- Provides the basis for solving social problems and achieving progress.
- A key feature of the positivist approach is the belief that reality exists outside and independently of the human mind:
- nature is made up of objective, observable, physical facts such as rocks, cells, stars etc which are external to our minds and which exist whether we like it or not.
- similarly, society is an objective factual reality - it is a real ‘thing’ made up of ‘social facts’ that exist ‘out there’, independently of individuals, just like the physical world.
What did August Comte say about sociology being a science?
August Comte says it is possible to discover the laws that control and shape the behaviour of people in society. 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.
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?
What are the patterns, laws and inductive reasoning that are used to explain how sociology to be a science?
- Reality is not random or chaotic, it is patterned. We can observe the empirical patterns - e.g. water boils at 100°C. It is the job of scientists to observe, identify, measure and record these patterns systematically, and then explain them.
- Positivists believe that ‘real laws are discoverable’ (Durkheim) that will explain these patterns. Like physicists discovered laws that govern nature, like laws of gravity, sociologists can discover laws that determine how society works. This is known as inductive reasoning.
- Induction involves accumulating data about the world through careful observation and measurement. As knowledge grows, we start to see general patterns. E.g. when an object is dropped, we may observe they always fall towards the earth at the same rate of acceleration.
Inductive logic - all my Instagram posts have 1m likes so this one will too’.
What did Durkheim believe?
Durkheim, a functionalist, adopted positivistic methods to generate some of his theories. Durkheim believed it is possible and desirable to discover laws of human behaviour that are generally true for all societies. He thought by using the methods of the natural sciences this was possible. He also believed that human behaviour can be explained in terms of external stimuli (things that happen to us) rather than internal stimuli (what goes on inside the human mind). To be scientific, you should only study what you can observe - social facts. It is therefore unscientific to study people’s emotions, meanings of motives, which are internal to the unobservable mind of the individual and therefore cannot be studied objectively.
What is an example of positivism being used for a study?
An example of how positivism can be used to study human behaviour is often illustrated in Durkheim’s famous study of Suicide which used a comparative method of research. In it he attempts to show how people’s behaviour is governed by external forces, and their ideas and feelings are irrelevant to their social behaviour.
How did Durkheim conduct his study on suicide?
Durkheim adopted the inductive approach which meant trying to explain something by first looking at the evidence and from that you induce/come up with theories, these are then tested against the evidence. Secondly, Durkheim based his work on Verificationism. From this point of view, theories can be confirmed through the collection of evidence.
What are Durkheim’s views on sociology being a science?
From Durkheim’s point of view, any Sociology that uses objective statistical methods, based on data produced by direct observation, is scientific.
The large scale use of the British Crime Survey and Victimisation Survey of the Home Office, means generalisation about criminal trends can be established (age, ethnicity, gender, location etc). This then helps them make future predictions about patterns of victimisation and criminal behaviour which can also lead to Social Policy legislation, such as anti-social behaviour orders.
Sociology should be considered a science - final thoughts
Sociology should be considered a science because through the use of the positivist approach we can observe empirical patterns or regularities through preferably laboratory experiments in a way that produces quantitative data. These tests can be replicated in future years to help us see trends and patterns in society.
What is Karl Popper’s criticism of induction?
The Fallacy of Induction
Popper rejects the view of inductive reasoning and verificationism due to fallacy of induction.
Example of fallacy of induction = Swans. Having observed a large number of swans, all of which were white, we might make the generalisation, ‘All swans are white’. However, a single observation of a black swan will destroy the theory. Thus we can never prove a theory is true simply by producing more observations that support or ‘verify’ it.
What is falsificationism?
For Popper, a good theory has 2 features:
- It is in principle falsifiable but when tested, stands up to all attempts to disprove it.
- It is bold - that is, it claims to explain a great deal. It makes big generalisations that precisely predict a large number of cases or events, and so is at greater risk of being falsified than a more timid theory that only tries to explain a small number of events.
For Popper, ‘all knowledge is provisional, temporary, capable of refutation at any moment’ - there can never be absolute proof that any knowledge is true. This is because as Stephen Hawking puts it: ‘No matter how many times the results of the experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory’.
A good theory isn’t necessarily a true theory, therefore - it is simply one that has withstood attempts to falsify it so far. Popper rejects verificationism in favour of falsification as the defining feature of science and argues that on this definition much sociology is unscientific, but that a scientific sociology is possible in principle.
What did Thomas Kuhn say?
Kuhn is critical of both positivists and Popper’s view of science because science does not work within this criterion. According to Kuhn science works within a paradigm.
What does Kuhn mean when he says science works within a paradigm?
A paradigm can be viewed as a framework of how things work, which is based on a set of shared assumptions, methods, and views on how ‘science works’ - a particular mindset. These frameworks are powerful influences on the way in which scientists - and people in general - think. Scientists are socialised into the paradigm through their education and training and come to accept it uncritically as true. This means scientist do not always work in a value-free manner.
Why should sociology NOT be considered a science?
Interpretivists do not believe sociology can adopt the principles and procedure of the natural sciences.
- Nature of the subject matter
- The aim of the subject
- The method to be used.
Why does the nature of the subject matter discount Sociology as a science?
Nature of the subject matter - The subject matter, ‘human beings’ is not suitable. Human beings have consciousness and free will which means their behaviour is influenced by experiences, feelings, and emotions; they internet any social event as they perceive it and give meaning to it before responding to it. Therefore, individuals are not puppets manipulated by external ‘social facts’ but are autonomous beings governed and influenced by their internal consciousness. It is difficult to establish a simple cause-and-effect relationship.
All research is inevitably based on subjective interpretations. For example, the topic chosen by the researcher, the type of questions generated in interviews, and the way data is analysed require some degree of subjectivity. This is because it requires interpretation on the part of the researcher to read and select relevant parts of the data and make decisions about the meaning, which may be based more on the personal beliefs and views of the researcher. For this reason, it is not possible to follow scientific methodology.
Interactionists believe we can have causal explanations but through a ‘bottom-up’ approach, or grounded theory. Ideas emerge gradually from the observations being made, rather than there already being a hypothesis.
