“What is science? Do you think that the methods used in natural sciences can be applied to sociology? Give reasons for your answer.” (2025)
- Science is a systematically acquired, organised, and cumulative body of certified knowledge, built on observable facts and a method that other observers can check.
- Its defining characteristics: empiricism (claims must rest on observable, verifiable evidence), a systematic and logical procedure, objectivity (findings unaffected by the observer’s preferences), testability/verifiability (claims are checked against evidence by the wider community), a drive toward general laws, and a cumulative, self-correcting character (later findings revise earlier ones).
- Early sociology — Comte, Spencer, and in a disciplined form Durkheim — was built explicitly on the wager that this same method could be transferred wholesale to the study of society.
- This answer weighs that wager directly: a genuine case exists for transfer, a genuine case exists against it, and the defensible position is a qualified, partial transfer rather than a flat yes or no.
The Case For: Sociology Can Use the Natural-Science Method
- Durkheim’s methodological demonstration is the strongest evidence for transferability: he insisted social facts be treated as “things” — external, observable, constraining — studied by first eradicating prenotions and then explaining one social fact by another, never by individual psychology.
- Lacking a laboratory, he substituted the method of concomitant variation: correlating the variation of one social fact (suicide rates) with another (religious affiliation, marital status, economic crisis) across many cases, functioning as sociology’s equivalent of a controlled experiment.
- His finding that suicide — the most seemingly private and psychological act — varies systematically with social integration and regulation showed genuine, law-like regularity in social life, exactly what a natural-science method is built to detect.
- On this basis, structural-functionalists from Radcliffe-Brown to Parsons continued to model sociology on natural science: define phenomena by observable structure and function, generalise across cases, and test propositions against data.
- Quantitative techniques — surveys, large-N statistical analysis, comparative method — routinely produce reliable, checkable, cumulative knowledge about aggregate social patterns (fertility trends, voting behaviour, income mobility), exactly the kind of knowledge natural-science method is designed to produce.
The Case Against: Structural Limits on Transfer
- The subject–object problem: a chemist studying a compound is not part of the compound and does not change it by observing it; a sociologist studying a community is embedded within the same social world being studied, sharing its language, categories, and often its values — the separation between knower and known that natural science assumes does not hold cleanly.
- The reflexivity/observer-effect problem: human subjects are aware of being studied and often modify their behaviour in response, and — as Anthony Giddens’s double hermeneutic points out — social actors can read and act on sociological findings themselves, altering the very reality the findings describe; inert matter never does this to a physicist.
- The impossibility of controlled experimentation: ethical and practical constraints forbid manipulating variables like poverty, family breakdown, or war exposure on human populations the way a natural scientist manipulates temperature or pressure in a lab, forcing sociology toward ex post facto and correlational designs that can rarely establish causation with the certainty of a controlled trial.
- Weber’s meaning critique: human action carries subjectively intended meaning invisible to pure external observation — the same observable behaviour (a raised hand) can be a greeting, a vote, or a threat, and only interpretive understanding (Verstehen) distinguishes them; a purely external, natural-science-style observation of behaviour systematically misses this layer.
- Non-repeatability of social events: a chemical reaction can be reproduced under identical conditions repeatedly; a historical event like a specific revolution or election cannot be re-run to test a hypothesis, since the social context that produced it is itself continually changing.
- A live illustration of this tension is the ongoing concern across the social and behavioural sciences about the replicability of findings — studies that appear statistically robust in one sample or cultural context frequently fail to reproduce in another, precisely because social phenomena, unlike physical constants, are sensitive to context, timing, and the reflexive awareness of the subjects being studied.
Weighing the Two Cases
- The natural-science method transfers well to sociology’s aggregate, structural dimension — where large numbers, statistical regularity, and comparison across cases can neutralise individual idiosyncrasy, as Durkheim showed.
- It transfers poorly to sociology’s meaningful, interpretive dimension — where the object of study is not a passive fact but an actor whose conduct is constituted by intention, and where the observer cannot achieve the detachment a natural scientist takes for granted.
- Sociology therefore cannot be reduced to physics with a different subject matter, but neither is it condemned to pure subjectivity — the discipline has developed its own controlled equivalents (comparative method, statistical inference, triangulation, systematic coding of qualitative data) that discipline inquiry without pretending to erase the reflexivity built into studying meaningful human conduct.
- Science is defined by systematic, verifiable, cumulative inquiry rather than by any single subject matter, so the real question is not whether sociology can copy physics wholesale but which of its methodological virtues transfer and which require modification.
- Durkheim proved that regularity and comparison can be found in social life; Weber proved that meaning cannot be reached by external observation alone — both are correct within their own domain, and neither claim cancels the other.
- The natural-science method therefore applies to sociology partially and with modification: its logic of systematic evidence, verification, and cumulative correction is fully appropriate, while its assumptions of a detached observer, a passive object, and repeatable controlled experiments require substantial adaptation.
- Treating sociology as identical to a natural science loses the meaning dimension that makes social life social; treating it as wholly incommensurable with science abandons the discipline needed to distinguish sound inference from speculation — the workable position sits between these two extremes.