Is Sociology A Science Essay

What is science?

To answer the question if sociology is a science or not, first we need to know what is science, otherwise the question does not make much sense. Actually current ph ilosophical views on the nature of science is 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 her e 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 crite ria, now philosophers like Lakatos (1970) admit tolerance to such failure to

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.

I do not have enough space to give a definition of science, but these considerations will be enough to help our judgment on the status of sociology. 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, comparison and historical research as a special case of comparison (CST pp. 89-90, SCS pp.42-54). These are the methodology used in several other scientific field, especially in biology. So if his sociology had really followed these methods, it would have been a st rong case for sociology as a science. But actually he never did empirical research (CST p. 110), so we cannot take his argument at the face