SOC 202 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Imre Lakatos, Social Fact, Scientific Method

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What is a science?
To answer the question if sociology is a science or not, first we need to know what is a science,
otherwise the question does not make much sense. Actually current philosophical views on the nature
of science are diverse, and largely liberalized from previous views. First, they no longer accept strong
criteria of falsification as a scientific method. There are several ways to formulate falsification, but here I
mean something like this:
Scientific theories should make observable predictions and we should discard a theory if we find only
one discrepancy between a prediction of the theory and an observation. Because even physics cannot
meet such a strong criteria, now philosophers like Lakatos (1970) admit tolerance to such failure to
some extent. Another new movement in philosophy is the attack on the universal laws. Cartwright
(1983) argued that seemingly universal physical laws are not really universal, from logical point of view.
This and other reasons, Cartwright (1983) and Hacking (1983) presented a new view of science in which
piecemeal "models", instead of universal laws and theories, play the central role of scientific
investigation. Here, "models" means oversimplified mental pictures of structure. For example, planetary
model of atoms is long known as an oversimplification, but still it is widely used by chemists as a
convenient way for thinking about chemical reactions.
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Is Sociology a Science?
With the analysis of science in the previous section in mind, let us turn to sociology. Early
sociologists tried to establish sociology as a science, and their arguments are mainly on the methodology
of sociology. Comte claimed that sociology uses four different kinds of methodologies, namely
observation, experiment. These are the methodology used in several other scientific fields, especially in
biology. So if his sociology had really followed these methods, it would have been a strong case for
sociology as a science. But actually he never did an empirical research, so we cannot take his argument
at the face value. But his argument influenced on other sociologists, especially Durkheim. For Durkheim,
soiology is a study o f soial fat. A soial fat is a thing that is external to, and coercive of, the actor".
Because they are external, social facts cannot be investigated by introspection. We should use
empirical research. Durkheim used statistics on suicide rate to establish his argument that suicide is a
social phenomenon. Durkheim applied too strict criteria of falsification to rival accounts. Adoption of
these strict criteria is suicidal for sociology, because it is hard for a sociological theory to make a precise
prediction, let alone to make a precise and correct prediction. And without this, the falsification criteria
do not work. Another related problem is in his rejection of introspection as a sociological method. This
restricts the scope of sociology too narrowly, and in fact even Durkheim's own study becomes
impossible. For example, Durkheim's definition of suicide is "any case of death 'resulting directly or
indirectly from a positive or negative act of an individual against himself, which he knows must produce
this result'" (ED p.32). But, without using introspection, how can we decide if he knows the result or not,
from external evidence only?
It is said that Weber's methodology provides an answer to these problems. His key word in this
point is "Verstehen", a German word for "understanding". According to him, we can "understand" other
people's motivation through understanding of our own intentions, and this kind of knowledge is
necessary for sociology. This is exactly what Durkheim denied as a method of sociology, but as we saw
even Durkheim himself used this "understanding" in his actual work. But, of course, the problem is if this
is permissible as a scientific method. Strong falsification of a theory is almost impossible by such facts,
because if an interpreted fact runs counter to the theory we can just change the interpretation. But, as
we saw in the last section, such strong falsification is given up by philosophers of science as too strict
criteria. Moreover, the arbitrariness of interpretation is not as great as one might worry. For example,
Comte's three stage theory has no follower today because there is no way we can reasonably interpret
the evolution of society as obeying such a law. In this case we can say that Comte's theory was falsified.
As far as we have this minimal possibility of falsification, we can admit "Verstehen" as a
scientific method of sociology, thus "interpretive" sociology as a science.
One of the reason people may argue against sociology as a science is the lack of the sociological theory.
We have Marx's theory, Durkheim's theory, ad Weer’s theory and so on, but none of them are shared
by all sociologists. This seems to make a strong contrast with other fields of science where scientists
agree on the basic theories.
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Document Summary

To answer the question if sociology is a science or not, first we need to know what is a science, otherwise the question does not make much sense. Actually current philosophical views on the nature of science are diverse, and largely liberalized from previous views. First, they no longer accept strong criteria of falsification as a scientific method. There are several ways to formulate falsification, but here i mean something like this: Scientific theories should make observable predictions and we should discard a theory if we find only one discrepancy between a prediction of the theory and an observation. Because even physics cannot meet such a strong criteria, now philosophers like lakatos (1970) admit tolerance to such failure to some extent. Another new movement in philosophy is the attack on the universal laws. Cartwright (1983) argued that seemingly universal physical laws are not really universal, from logical point of view.

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