what is - marshall.k12.il.us · pdf file* the birth of sociology • it also relied heavily...

WHAT IS

Marshall High School Sociology

Mr. Cline Unit One- Slides B

* The Birth of Sociology

• To understand what Sociology is, and how it became this, we must reach even farther back into the history of History itself, and examine why “the truth” was so elusive in the field.

• To do so, we must understand that while Archaeology is the study of artifacts, History is the study of written records, and without writing, there can be no History.

• If writing is an aid to memory, and memory is imperfect, it reasons that History is imperfect as well, and therefore cannot accurately reflect the truth.


• As the first writing was merely lists of things, not only did it inaccurately portray truth, but it also left much to be desired in what to take from it in the way of lessons. • For example, what lesson could you learn and be prepared to impart to

others by reading an old grocery list to someone?

• The lack of applicable lessons was also the weakness of the next period of History, the Chronicle.


• It also relied heavily on imperfect memory, but it was a little more than merely a

list, as it did give dates and what events occurred on those dates. • For example, this from the Irish Annals; “March, 824: Scelec was raided by

heathens and Étgal was carried away as booty, and he perished with hunger because of them.” • Who was Étgal, why was he important enough to note in the annals?

Who were these heathens? Where did they come from? Why did they take Étgal?

• All of these questions lead to the second element necessary for the study of History; and that is inquiry, or the interpretation of events in order to derive some meaning from them.


• The first person to add this element to the study of writing, and is now considered the “Father of History”, was a Greek philosopher named Herodotus.


• He described his process, and defined the study of History in the introduction to his first great work, The Persian Wars, a history of the wars between Greece and Persia, as such; • “Herodotus of Halicarnassus, his histories are here set down to preserve the

memory of the past by putting on record the astonishing achievements both of our own and of other peoples, and more particularly, to show how they came into conflict.”

• Of course, his interpretation of the events meaning to the daily lives of Greeks was hotly contested. The great philosopher Socrates even went so far as to describe Herodotus as “The Father of Lies”.

• So, if interpretations of the meaning of historical events can differ, where again, do we find the truth that we can universally learn from?

• To complicate matters further, History has also been used for other purposes throughout the centuries, by Historians who have their own objectives, goals agendas, and biases.

• Take for example, History used as the great story….


• If History is intended to impart meaning and a lesson for future generations, does the truth even matter? Can’t a great story set in the past, with, perhaps, some basis for truth, serve just as well for this purpose?


• And for that matter, if truth is not that important to providing material to teach a lesson, then why bother with it at all, and then you can impart any lesson you want freely, including why some are superior to others?

The History of History

• For nearly 4,000 years History was dominated by the great story used as propaganda, or to draw out moral lessons, and it was only the actions of great men that moved it forward.

• The Catholic Church was fond of this method as a means to impart moral lessons and the lives of the saints, as well as their own theological interpretations of scripture. • The Renaissance, and the increase in literacy, as well as changes in religious thought during the Enlightenment, forced man to consider the nature of truth, and if the history they had learned was true. • Much of what the Catholic Church taught could not be found in the Bible, so if

the church could not be trusted to impart truth in their histories, then who?

• If these histories were not true, then what was History for, who moved it, and what was its purpose?


• It was about this time that several learned men, philosophers, developed multiple theories on the nature of truth, what it was, and how we acquire the knowledge to recognize it.

• One of these men was an English scientist named Francis Bacon.

• Bacon is considered the father of modern science, for, among many things, creating what we refer to today as the scientific method • The Scientific Method is a way of gaining

knowledge in order to lead to truth. It always begins with a person’s (the scientist) curiosity, and thus is born a question, such as “Why do we have war?”

• The scientist would then take his best, educated, guess as to the answer, what we would call the hypothesis. For example, “We have war because men are inherently aggressive and violent creatures.”


• A scientist, using the scientific method, would then have to develop some sort of experiment to test their hypothesis. • Experiments, by necessity, are designed to collect quantitative

data, or in other words, non emotionally biased numbers, that when analyzed can either prove or disprove a hypothesis.

• When enough experiments are done that can show a general trend that the hypothesis usually holds, then this becomes a theory.

• If the repeated results of several experiments almost always follow this theory, it can be said to be a law.

• Theories and laws, because they can be applied to repeated manifestations of an experiment and receive the same results, are said by followers of the scientific method to then be “truth”.

• Followers of This Baconian Method (another term for describing the scientific method) became known as empiricists. Empiricists believe that knowledge only comes from experience gained from our senses (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting) and the collection of evidence, especially as discovered in experiments.


• Beginning in the mid to late 18th century, the field of History came to be dominated by empiricists, who saw the success that empiricism had in the fields of the natural sciences (chemistry, biology, physics) during the historical period we refer to as “The Scientific Revolution.”

• Many historians who believed in empiricism felt that many fundamental questions of human existence, such as; Why is there war? What is the proper role of government? Is there free will?, etc. could be answered not through the philosophical interpretation of past events, but through observation and experimentation. (and there is a way to accomplish this in the field of History, but that is for a History class) All of which would require the collection of data.

• However, that nagging question of the existence of truth returned to haunt even the empiricists. • We all have our own biases, our own reasons for looking at the world as we do,

and therefore our hypotheses, the educated reasons we think things happen, are inherently biased.

• This is not a bad thing, in of itself, and instead of the connotative and loaded term bias, we might call it a different perspective.

The Birth of Sociology

• For some, to answer the question of “Why do men go to war?”, their automatic assumption would be predicated on scarce resources, such as land, money, oil, power, and the desire for some men to have more than others. • If you remember from a previous slide, we identified seven different social

sciences, one of which was Economics.

• Economics is the study of the choice of allocation of scarce resources in conditions of unlimited demand for them.

• So, if your hypotheses generally tend towards how scarce resources are allocated, such as in our example answer to the question regarding war, you may have more of an economic perspective.

• For others, the answer to the question may always be predicated on the actions of the individual leaders who bring them into conflict, and their personalities and behaviors. • This is a psychological perspective.

• Having these unique perspectives about how things happen, and what governs human

behavior and actions is what guides empiricists in developing their hypotheses.


• Given the need for a systematic way to collect data and evaluate evidence, and unique perspectives about how the world works, empirical thinkers began branching out from History to form empirical social sciences centered on each of their perspectives.

• They all have the same goal as their parent field of History, however, and that is to explain how and why humans behave as they do.

• Sociology is one of those social sciences. • Whereas Economics is the study of choice, Sociologists might argue that we have

no choice, that decisions are already made based on the constructs of what societies will allow through their organization and accepted rules of behavior.

• While Psychology is the study of innate individual action, Sociologists may argue that it is societal institutions and groups that guide and motivate, not the individual, and hence the focus of their studies is on how groups of people interact with each other through organization and cultures. • In fact, they deridingly refer to the psychological perspective as Psychological

Reductionism, as it ignores the influence of society on individual action.

• This outlook on what moves humanity and human history forward is the Sociological Perspective.


* The Industrial Revolution and the Development of Sociology

• The industrial revolution changed society in several ways

• People no longer stayed their entire lives in one small village, rarely getting to go anywhere else, prior to the industrial revolution

• After the industrial revolution, people were moving to large, crowded cities, away from family, and close to others from strange cultures, religions, and traditions

• Families were no longer primarily farmers, renting land from richer aristocracy, where God ordained rulers, rulers provided land, the father farmed the land and ran the family, and everything was ordered.

• After the American and French Revolutions, people saw the fall of traditional social order, duty, tradition, and submission to authority were being replaced with ideas of freedom, individual rights, and equality


• In addition to the sweeping changes in Europe, the growth of colonial empires and international trade brought Europeans into conflict with peoples whose customs and values were quite different from their own. • Most Europeans believed that their own culture was clearly superior.

• They believed that they were rational creatures while others were slaves to

superstition or to primitive, animal passions.

• But scholars were perplexed by cultural diversity. Where had European civilization come from, and where was it headed?

• It was from this social and intellectual turmoil that Sociology was born. • Common sense explanations of the world, based on past experience, no longer

applied.

• Social philosophy, which dealt with what society should be like, could not explain what was currently happening in the real world


• What governments, businesses, and ordinary citizens needed was a science of society, a means by which to ascertain the truth of what made up societies, their influences on people, and how their behavior was affected by their social interactions

• They required a science that would gather a large body of factual information

put into perspective by systematically tested theories, that would help them understand and adapt them to the modern era

• Economics and Psychology were fields that had come before, and led to, the creation of the social science of Sociology

• As Economics and Psychology were growing as fields of study, an empiricist named Auguste Comte called for the creation of a science that would aid in understanding the massive societal changes that were occurring as a result of the industrial revolution and the advent of the modern era.


• He called this new science Sociology, and is considered the father of the field.

• Apart from the creation of this field, Comte’s main

contribution to the field was the advocation of his philosophy, Positivism, which regards society as resembling the physical world which has patterns, regularities and laws.

• He advocated that social scientists should adopt the methods used by natural scientists such as observation, and experimentation in the study of social life, and that social scientists should use the scientific approach to study two main social forces: social change and social order.

• Through the contributions of Comte, and the many other Sociologists that came after him , the coherent understanding of what the study of Sociology is came to be defined as; the social science that studies the impact of social institutions on the development of people and history in order to guide political, legal, and moral policy making for all.

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