Sociology is a science. Positivists view ideas, thought and mind as scientists see atoms. They suggest that a sociologist should be "in the same state of mind as the physicist, chemist or physiologist when he probes into a still unexplored region of the scientific domain" (Durkheim). Some sociologists suggest that sociological research should share many similarities to the empirical research methods employed by scientists. In keeping objectivity, one can only study that which can be seen, measured and observed with the purpose of discovering what causes things to happen. From this standpoint, using the definition of science mentioned above, sociology is a science.
Sociology is not a science. Thomas Kuhn argued that socilogy was not scientific on the grounds that the two fields were operating in different ways. Science, Kuhn theorised, exists in formations of paradigms that explain the natural world whereas sociology, in its abstract concept, exists in a pre-pardigmatic form thus rendering it pre-scientific. Such a view was shaped based on the contrasts between evidence in the two fields and its relationship with us and the field itself.
Ofcourse, as with any other hot debate there is a perpsective on this that falls somehwere in between; I suppose one might question whether sociology is or is not a science but if we look at all sociological research, all theory, all methods and key theorists, another question seems more suffice: under what circumstances is sociology a science? I have highlighted circumstances wherby objective facts have been quantified with the use of scientific method, such use lends sociology to the definition of science mentioned above and can therfore be defined as science. In a painfully contradictory manner, I have highlighted with Kuhn’s theory how science and sociology work on different dynamics and cannot be labelled as one and the same. It seems clear that sociology is a science and there is evidence to support this, with equating evidence to support that sociology is not a science.
In spite of such parodxies seemingly existing in one field, further observation can be made to perhaps gain an understanding further based on the ‘truth’. The majority of science, excluding para-scientific research and knowledge, is objective and where one scientist can measure a variable, such as the boiling point of dimethyltryptamine, another scientist can do the same and attain the same measure. Society and henceforth sociology is by no means the same regardless of the use of scientific method. Unlike much of the natural world studied in science, such as physics, society does not produce the same results in measures of the same variable; it seems that, like human relationships or even human thought, society is subjectivley something in complete continuity, always in a state of change, never resonating the same way on any given day; society is not an objective reality but a subjective phenomena and with this the definition of science mentioned does not credit sociology as being a science - this ‘reality’ is too complicated and “Sociology is not, cannot be, and should not be a science.”
