A Critique of the Different Views on Sociology

Positivists argues that sociology can be a science by modelling itself on the natural sciences, however interpretivists argues that sociology cannot be scientific because human conduct is governed by internal meanings Khun argues that a shared paradigm is the most important part of science, whereas realists argue that science studies unobservable facts as well as observable facts. Positivism has the view that sociology can adopt the logic and methods of the natural sciences as the best way to gain true knowledge about society.

They believe that the patterns we observe, whether in science or society, can all be explained by finding the facts that cause them. For example, we can explain the social facts of educational failure through another social fact such as material deprivation Durkheim used the study of suicide to demonstrate sociology was a science with its own distinctive subject matter. Using official statistics, he observed patterns in suicide rates and concluded they are not individual motives, but that they are caused by other social facts.

Social facts are forces acting on members to determine their behaviour, and Durkheim claimed the social facts responsible for these patterns were the levels of integration and regulation within a society He claimed to have discovered the law that the different levels of these social facts produced different levels of suicide rates Some critics argue that sociology is not a science because the natural sciences study subject matter that has no consciousness, and so its behaviour can therefore be explained as a reaction to a stimulus Whereas, sociology studies people who do have a consciousness, meaning they have free will and can exercise choice so society cannot be studied in the same way as the natural sciences, Interpretivists reject the logic and methods of the natural sciences, because they argue that to discover the meanings people give to their actions, we need to see the world from their viewpoint; to do this we must use what Weber calls ‘verstehen’ to grasp other people‘s meanings.

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In other words, we must put ourselves in the place of the actor and see and think about things the way that they do. lnterpretivists favour the use of qualitative data methods and data, such as participant observation and unstructured interviews, since these give sociologists a subjective understanding of the meanings of the actor. Atkinson argues that we can never know the real rate of suicide, even using qualitative methods, because we can never know for sure what meanings the deceased actors heldl He says that the only thing we can study is the ways the living make sense of the deaths e.g. the interpretive procedures coroners use to classify deaths. In support of this, postmodernists argue that a scientific approach is dangerous because it claims a monopoly of the truth and excludes other points of view. By doing this, it is also a form of domination, for example, in the Soviet Union Marxism was used to justify oppression and coercionl Popper‘s view is that science is a unique form of knowledge because of principle called falsificationism. A scientific statement is one that in principle is capable of being falsified; for a theory to be falsifiable, it must be open to criticism.

Therefore, science is a public activity as everything is open to criticism, so that flaws can be exposed and better theories developed This explains why scientific knowledge grows so rapidly and thrives in open societies. In contrast, closed societies stifle the growth of science because they conflict with the falsifiable nature of scientific knowledge, for example, Galileo was punished by the church for claiming the earth revolved around the sun, not the way the church taught (that the sun revolved around the earth), However, Popper believes that sociology can be scientific because it is capable of producing hypotheses that can in principle be falsified, and also believes untestable ideas may become testable at some point so we can still examine them for clarity and logical consistency.

Unlike Popper, Khun sees the central idea of science to be a paradigm. This is a basic set of assumptions, principles, methods, and techniques in which members of that community work. It is thus a set of norms, or a type of culture, as it tells scientists how they should think and behave within the community, for example, physicists follow one paradigm and biologists follow another paradigm Scientists accept the paradigm uncritically as a result of their socialisation, and so they are not invited to consider rival perspectives as these other perspectives may disagree or conflict with the paradigm. Conformity to the paradigm is rewarded with publication of the scientists’ work and results in career success, but deviation may mean that their work is not published, and can even lead to dismissal. However, sociology is pre»paradigmat_ic, so it can only become a science if basic disagreements are resolved.

This may not be possible as there are conflicts both between and within perspectives, so it can be hard to imagine these differences being overcome to create a single, shared paradigm Postmodernists also argue that a paradigm is undesirable as it sounds like a meta-narrative. Keat 81 Urry stress the similarities between sociology and some natural sciences in terms of the amount of control the researcher has over the variables being researched. Realists argue that sociologists study open systems and so the processes are much too complex to make precise predictions, for example, we cannot predict the crime rate precisely as there are too many variables which affect itr For realists, both the natural and social sciences attempt to explain the causes of events in terms of underlying structures and processes, Realists reject that science only concerns observable phenomena e.g. physicists cannot directly observe inside a black hole, Just like we can‘t observe a physical thing like social class but we observe the effects it has on people’s lives.

Realists reject interpretivism as they see little difference between natural sciences and sociolog)’, except that some natural sciences can study closed systems. Overall, realists and positivists ague that sociology is a science, however, interpretivists put forward the point that society and the people in it cannot be measured like objects, and therefore not scientifically Although Durkheim put forward the idea of social facts, there are too many variables making it difficult to be measured; even though this can be attempted through scientific methods, it still can’t be precise. In conclusion, sociology is a valuable subject, but it cannot be considered a science, just as having scientific qualities.