Can Sociology be a Science?
Sociology as a Science?
The debate surround Sociology as a Science asks if Sociology can be scientific and if social patterns and people can be studied like other areas of science like medicine, physics or maths.
What is Science?
The Scientific Method involves inductive reasoning in a process where studies should be testable, objective, empirical and repeatable.
Karl Popper - in sociology textbooks we turn to Popper to give us a definition of science.
He gives us 5 components of science
- Empiricism
- Testable
- Theoretical
- Cumulative
- Objective
So in order for research to be scientific it should meet these 5 criteria.
Argument 1 - Positivism
Positivists argue that Sociology can and should be considered a science and that it meets the 5 criteria laid out above. They believe that methods and procedures of other scientific subjects like physics and chemistry can be applied to the study of society and that human behaviour is a response to external forces
Positivists believe that society is patterned, that these patterns can be observed and that conclusions can then be drawn in a scientific manner.
Early Sociologist Comte believed that society could be studied in the same way as natural sciences and that human behaviour followed the laws of cause and effect just like in the natural world.
Social Facts
Another early Sociologist, Durkheim argue that studying human behaviour in this empirical manner can lead to Social Facts. Positivists believe that humans can be observed and measured quantitatively and then social facts can be created from these studies. Positivists argue that Social Class is a social fact as there are clear differences between the classes in income, crime rate and educational achievement. They claim that these social facts can be tested and verified, e.g. there are trends in social class differences throughout the world, therefore it is scientific as it can be tested, repeated and conclusions can be drawn.
These facts are separate from individuals but individuals are still impacted by outside elements such as institutions and individuals cannot do as they wish without encountering a range of social sanctions (punishment).
Durkheim then went on to attempt to prove that Sociology could be a science by studying suicide.
He chose suicide in particular because he believed it was the most personal act that a human could do and he wanted to demonstrate that even the most personal human acts and decisions were governed by outside, societal factors.
He studied official statistics on suicide rates from a range of European countries and claimed that the causes of suicide were imbalances in the degrees of social integration and moral regulation of society. When there are imbalances, that is when social problems occur and that is when suicide occurs. This claim is somewhat backed up by the rise of suicides in the great depression era and the rise of mental health problems in the wake of the Covid 19 pandemic.
Durkheim concluded that it is a Social Fact that in times of chaos, stress and uncertainty that people would turn to suicide depending on their degree of integration.
Click on this link for some official statistics on suicide in England and Wales since 1981;
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7749/
The main features of Positivism
- Human behaviour is a response to social facts and can be explained in terms of cause and effect
- Quantitative data and statistics should be used to study society
- Research should focus on the causes of social patterns and events
- The focus of Sociology is on the study of social structures and institutions as a whole. Positivism is a macro ideology that looks at the big picture rather than micro interactions.
Argument 2 - Interpretivism
Interpretivists disagree with Positivists by claiming that Sociology cannot be a science. They state that humans do not simply respond to external forces as positivists claim and that meaning and interpretation should be given to human behaviour. They claim that human behaviour is too complex to be reduced to numbers (quantitive) and that in order to understand human behaviour we must interpret the meanings people give to citations and decisions. Max Weber called this Verstehen - which is recognising that people give meaning to their actions and it is better to try to put yourself in the position of people whose actions they are trying to understand.
This perspective offers a clear criticism of Durkheim’s study of suicide. There are a range of complexities, meanings and emotions in suicide that may lead to an action. There may also be factors that could impact official statistics on suicide that could give a misleading picture of the overall figures.
Interpretivists prefer qualitative data where they can attain more in-depth information relation to a conscious humans motives, feelings and circumstances which they in turn are gives a better understanding of human behaviour rather than mere empirical numbers.
To find out why someone carried out an action interpretivists would ask that person “why”? “Why did you commit that crime?”, whereas positivists may assume he/she committed the crime because they are from the working class.
Cause and effect positivist explanations of human behavior cannot be relied on as there are too many variables that could impact on a person’s action, e.g. perhaps they didn’t sleep well, or are on medication, or had a fight with their family, or are feeling anxious, etc.
Humans have agency, meaning that we choose who we act or react in a given situation. Not all humans will react in the same way, they are not like chemicals in a lab and not all scenarios can be as predictable as water boiling at 100c.
Argument 3 - Sociology Could be a Science - Popper
Sociologist Karl Popper argues that Sociology could be a science if it followed some guidelines that he sets out in his theory on falsification. He says that at present Sociology is not falsifiable but if it became falsifiable it could become a science.
This means that researchers should be open to their hypothesis being proven wrong rather than looking for evidence to back up their initial assumptions.
Karl Popper suggests that science involves the hypothetic-deductive method. This involves formulating a hypothesis (explanation/prediction) and then investigating through research in order to draw conclusions from the findings.
Falsification
Popper suggests that no hypothesis can ever be proven fully true as something may happen in the future to prove it false.
He claims that too much Sociological research is inductive - meaning they look for evidence to support their hypothesis, rather than looking for evidence to disprove their hypothesis. He uses case of the white swan to make this point. He argues a claim like “all swans are white” can never be fully proven true as there is the possibility of an exception. So scientists should search for the non-white swan to falsify their hypothesis rather than seeking evidence to prove it true. This would strengthen their research and help it to stand up to scrutiny, making it more likely to be a scientific truth.
Popper suggests that much Sociological theory is not scientific as it cannot be falsified by empirical research and will only become scientific when produces testable and falsifiable hypotheses. It would be better to use a deductive model of research rather than inductive.
Popper criticises the Marxist idea of false class consciousnesses. How could we falsify a concept like false class consciousness?
Can you imagine an interview -
“do you think you are being exploited by the bourgeoise?”
“No”
“Ah, that’s because of false class consciousness”
“No its not!”
“Well you would say that, because of false class consciousness”
In conclusion, Popper claims that right now Sociological theories like Functionalism, Feminism and Marxism are too vague and cannot be entirely proven, verified and falsified and therefore cannot be a science. This is why Sociology is still comprised of debates and disagreements rather than hard facts and conclusions.
Argument 4 - Kuhn - Paradigms
Kuhn questions if scientists really do set to do research with the aim of trying to falsify their hypothesis as Popper suggested. Instead he claimed that scientists work within paradigms, which are sets of beliefs, laws, concepts and assumptions that are set in place and not called into question until the evidence against them is overwhelming.
Most scientists accept the paradigm into which they have been trained, educated and indoctrinated and the scientific mindset does not move on to a new mindset until the old paradigm has been completely proven wrong.
Kuhn argues that science changes not as Popper suggests through a series of falsified hypotheses, but in dramatic leaps of breakthrough findings that cause an old scientific paradigm to breakdown and a new one to take its place.
An example of this would be human’s believing that the earth is flat, but then there was enough scientific evidence to prove without doubt that the earth is round. The old flat earth paradigm died and a new paradigm entered based on new evidence.
Kuhn claims that Science must have a single paradigm for it to be reliably scientific, but Sociology does not have this as there is still too much disagreement between the theories. Even within a theory such a feminism, there is a range of differing theories of feminism that disagree with each other. Therefore Sociology cannot be a science!
Are you ready to have your mind blown? This raises the question, can science be a science? As there are differing views with Sociology, there are also differing views within science. Scientists often disagree drastically as was seen from differing opinions on the Covid 19 pandemic and the measures taken by a country like Sweden that didn’t lockdown whereas other countries did based on the opinions of Swedish scientists. In medical matters patients often opt for a second opinion and doctors often disagree on how to treat a patient based on differing opinions.
Postmodernists believe that science is just another metanarrative but other beliefs and ideas are available that run counter to science (alternative therapies) and people are free to pick and mix what they choose.
Can science be value free? - No possibly not because a lot of scientific research is funded by governments, companies and charities. It often is biased and tainted to show results that are favourable to the funding body, e.g. will lung research funded by a tobacco company want results to show that smoking is bad for the lungs? Or would research funded by an oil company want finding to show that oil is bad for the environment?
Argument 5 - Realist view of Science
Realists believe that Sociology could be a science - but an open science, rather than a closed exact science.
For example, meteorology (weather prediction) is a science - but is often wrong, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t strive to be scientific in its predictions and as we know, the weather forecaster is often right!
As with weather and social science - we can make model predictions on issues that may happen but because there are so many variables at play it can be hard to make a 100% prediction. But this does not mean that it isn’t accurate sometimes.
In Sociology just because there are variable and unpredictable circumstances, this does not mean that we cannot carry out valuable research that can show correlations, trends and patterns. This does not stop social science from being a science! It is more of an open science rather a closed science like chemistry were we can accurately predict how chemicals will interact when combined.
Conclusion
In your answers you will have to display a good understanding of the varying ideas on whether sociology can be a science. Show your evaluation skills by criticising each theory with another and perhaps conclude with a point on Postmodernism by mentioning if science can even be considered a science and if not then perhaps sociology is as scientific as any other discipline.
For further reading and info follow the links below
Tutor2u on YouTube - Is Sociology a Science?
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