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SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION AND INVESTIGATION
LECTURE 2 (Margaret Archer)
Social Theory as the Science of Society
1. The importance of the Enlightenment
Generally this consisted in a belief in the of power of reason to account for and improve the human condition(s).
Specifically this meant making same progress in investigating ‘people’ as natural sciences had made with inert matter (position known as ‘naturalism’).
Crucially this was based on thinking of society as ordered like nature, therefore investigable and subject to laws (of same kind which natural science supplied for the natural world).
This notion of determinacy is essential to the possibility of science
2. Auguste Comte (1798-1857) and the assertion of determinacy
The significance of his thought was in overturning speculative thinking, which could not conceive of social-scientific investigation since it denied the ordered nature of things social- i.e. those who held that social events:-
“were always exposed to disturbance by the accidental intervention of the legislator, human or divine, (this meant) no scientific previsions of them would be possible”.
As long as it was held that social reality/life was arbitrary/fortuitous, there could be no science of society , no conclusive agreement on various ‘speculations’, no progress in understanding (for one opinion was as good as another : there was nothing, no
‘evidence’ to arbitrate between them)
Comte, instead, argued that natural science had established ‘lawfulness’ amongst the chaotic appearance of natural phenomena (which also once looked fortuitous and accidental and used to be explained e.g. by the anger/caprice of the gods), NOW the time was ripe to do the same for society.
(Then, ‘freedom of opinion’, which makes no sense in physics, would be equally inappropriate in the new science of society)
3. The model of Newtonian physics
This was Comte’s ideal : a science not looking for ‘first’ or ‘final’ causes (as has the
Scholastic theologians), but a quest for modest laws like those of thermodynamics.

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Think of the second law (heat transfer between two objects). This is purely a law
(empirical generalisation) about
“invariable relations of succession and resemblance” whose establishment relied on
“reasoning and observation, duly combined”
NOTE the key elements in the above :-
-reliance on sense data (we observe and then reason about our observations)
-the assumption that we can observe PEOPLE like OBJECTS
-the search is for regular connections, not causal mechanisms
So Comte advocated the development of ‘ social physics
’ -saw it becoming the
‘Queen of the Sciences’ (chemistry studies small particles; biology, organic wholes; sociology would be the most holistic - in its study the whole of society)
Now it needed a method of investigation
To study it as a whole, the method consisted in
‘viewing each element in the light of the whole system’
. It could never be reduced to the study of individual people because individuals become/behave different(ly) in society. Our proper study was society itself and as a whole .
The objective , to be achieved through observation, comparison and the detection of objective regularities , was:-
‘to discover through what fixed series of successive transformations the human race, starting from a state not superior to that of the great apes, gradually led to the point where civilised Europe finds itself today” (1822)
4. Durkheim (1858-1917) takes up the science of society
He was convinced that Comte was correct that :-
- Sociology could be a self-standing discipline, with its own subject matter, society as a whole (i.e. more than the sum of its parts) - hence separate from psychology.
- that there were laws to be discovered - these again were empirically established regularities (“constant conjunctions”, in Hume’s terminology: ‘correlations’ in ours)
-BUT he wanted a rigorous sociological method (elaborated in his Rules ...).
The three main points of these Rules
1.
Definition and delineation of our subject matter
Basically society is something external to us yet which acts upon us.
It has properties of its own which are not reducible to those of individual people - these are properties of its own kind ( sui generis ); not of our kind.
This is our subject matter - SOCIAL FACTS (i.e. facts about Society) :-
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group facts (E.g. a political party can’t be explained by its component members, but only by their interactions - ‘social facts’ are their consequences).
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social factors ( which can belong to society but not to individuals, such as social integration, suicide rates, division of labour, belief systems).
So, how can we grasp them ? a) they are external (to any individual: to demonstrate this they endure when particular individuals (or groups of them) die. b) they are constraining (have an effect on people willy nilly : demonstration - you didn’t produce 18 years of Tory Gov., but live with its effects).

3 c) but he wanted to go further and also to regard them as objective (this is the most problematic)
2. The above is the source of his positivistic method for Sociology
Summed up in his methodological injunction :-
“Treat social facts as things”
Then they can be studied scientifically, like objects in natural science: the injunction is to observe and measure an objective thing.
HENCE the first reliance in ‘sociology’ upon data collection, measurement, and
STATISTICS.
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Statistics were viewed as providing objective measures of ‘social facts’, E.g. the suicide rate recorded in different countries/times - NOTE these are taken at face value, without consideration that they are/were products of people, which raises the
Q as to their objectivity versus their constructed nature.
 If a ‘social fact’ was not directly observable/measurable, like ‘social solidarity’, then D. tells us to look for an objective indicator of it . (As in natural sci.,
‘temperature’ is not directly observable - so thermometers were developed)
Thus, for ‘mechanical social solidarity’, based on ‘likeness’ in primitive societies, he took as an indirect but objective index of it - the extent of ‘repressive law’
(early criminal law - which punishes deviations from the norm).
3. For Sociology to be a self-standing (autonomous) scientific discipline D has to put (1) and (2) above together.
In doing so, he specifies what a sociological law or explanation is.
HENCE:-
“only explain one social fact by another”
This means, never try to explain it by individual attributes (reduction).
Thus, (as we’ll examine later) the social fact of a ‘suicide rate’ is never to be explained by individuals’ dispositions to commit suicide, but by some other social fact: that is by something external, constraining and objective - which here turned out to be the degree of social integration of society and different groups in it.
5. This is the birth of the Science of Society as Positivist Sociology
Namely, that our subject matter, methods and explanations are about the:-
External (supposed hard facts), which are,
Observable (by sense data, either directly or through an index accessible to the senses),
Objective (being considered as a mirror of nature)
This is held to lead to scientific laws - which are both predictive and prescriptive.
It is only one view of science (strong naturalism).
Its problems arise from whether positivism works at all PLUS the additional problems of applying it to people rather than matter.
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Problems surrounding OBSERVATION and OBJECTIVITY
Basically, are there ‘hard facts’, detectable by our senses ?
Can we assume that ‘social reality speaks to us directly and all we have to do is to record it ?

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QUESTION : do we have access to any data at all as direct sense data?
Take ‘the cat sat on the mat’ - need concepts of ‘cat’ and ‘mat’ - we don’t see these, only shapes: it is our languages which pick out and name shapes.
AND different languages pick out (discriminate) different things, e.g. English could just pick out ‘animals’ or ‘medium sized animals’ or ‘domestic pets’.
Other languages can be richer - the 12 Eskimo words for snow, which enables them to do in their language what we can’t do in ours.
So, in our English sentence ‘It’s snowing’, we do not observe that ‘It’s snowing impactable snow’.
(Of course we could say/’see’ this if we learned Eskimo - it is not that we live in different worlds where things like snow are different because of language)
Rather, the point is that ALL our observations are conceptually formed (mediated by concepts, like those in natural language) which pick out certain features but not others.
These concepts actively shape our observations - BECAUSE observation is always in a language (even if we can and do learn and invent new ones - and revise old ones)
There is no one pure observational language - this only exists as God’s-eye-view.
Just as some things can be said in one language (like the different types of snow), also some things cannot be said in a given language (e.g. Watership Down’s ‘lapine’ had no number above 5, just a word for more than 5, so it was impossible to discriminate between there being 6 predators in the next field versus 60 or 600).
Thus, all observations are ‘theory-laden’, if only by the concepts available in natural languages (and the same goes for artificial ones)
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PROBLEMS surrounding OBSERVATION and EXTERNALITY
The positivist assumption is, that as social scientists, we are concerned/confined to
‘observables’ (detectable by our 5 senses).
BUT no science is. Nor was it at the start of the nineteenth century (which used nonobservable concepts such as ‘gravity’, ‘magnetism’, ‘conduction’ etc.)
SIMILARLY, many of the things in which we are interested are non-observables - take the following rag-bag - ‘ a criminal’s motives’, ‘centralization’, ‘alienation’,
‘norms , values and beliefs’, ‘discrimination’, and, v. importantly ‘social organization’.
Now some of these are also internal to us as subjects and not external (internal ones are unlike ‘interest rates’ or ‘life-chances’ or ‘health service provisions’).
These would include - ‘dispositions’, ‘identity’ ‘commitment’, ‘belief’, ‘opinion’ etc., for even if these are formed in an observable social setting (school classroom,
Church), for us to hold them, we have to adopt and internalize them. (N.B. we can’t assume anything about someone’s religious beliefs because we see them in Church).
THUS we need to ask if Sociology should try to be a positivistic science, whether it can endorse positivism and its methodology or whether, even if we want a
Scientific Sociology, this must be different from a positivist Sociology.

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