Philosophy of Sociology

The Philosophy of Sociology examines the foundational concepts, theories, and methodologies that underpin the field of sociology. It addresses key philosophical questions about social phenomena, the nature of society, and the role of the sociologist. This branch of philosophy explores how sociological inquiries can reflect or challenge societal norms and values, emphasizing the importance of critical thinking in understanding social structures and relationships.

Central to this discipline is the interplay between individual agency and social structure, examining how personal choices are influenced by broader societal forces. The Philosophy of Sociology also interrogates ethical considerations in research, including the impact of sociological findings on diverse communities. By engaging with various philosophical perspectives, this field encourages a deeper understanding of social behavior and the complexities of human interactions. As such, it serves as a vital framework for both sociologists and those interested in the theoretical aspects of social science.

Published in: 2021

By: Bill Kte’pi, MA

Subject Terms

Philosophy of Sociology

Last reviewed: February 2017

Abstract

A subfield of the philosophy of social sciences, the philosophy of sociology is a branch of philosophy concerned with structural, ethical, and methodological issues in the field of sociology. While sociology studies the behavior and nature of human societies, the philosophy of sociology studies the way sociologists do so, including their methodologies and uses of data, the assumptions and predispositions underpinning their work, and the relationship of their work to the cultural and social environment in which that work is done.

Overview

The philosophy of sociology is the study of the methodologies, predispositions, and other relationships and systems involved in the field of sociology. The philosophy of the social sciences, of which sociology is among the most prominent and most influential, developed side by side with the social sciences themselves and overlaps considerably with the philosophy of science as a whole.

Sociology is the study of human behavior on a large scale and of the institutions, organizations, networks, and movements that humans form. Sociology and philosophy essentially have a common origin in that both make a formal study of the human condition. However, not only does philosophy as a whole address concerns broader than that, it has traditionally depended on a priori justification. (Experimental philosophy is an exception and a modern development.) Sociology is just the opposite, grounded in empirical data, both quantitative and qualitative analysis, and scientific methodologies that have become increasingly sophisticated over time.

While philosophy has ancient roots, sociology is a modern phenomenon. At the most, we can speak of early “sociological thinking” or use “sociology” as shorthand for pre-sociological thinkers and fields of study. The ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius, for instance, wrote extensively on social roles, but neither collected nor analyzed data. The fourteenth century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun contributed sophisticated theoretical work on social conflict and social organization, and relied more on analysis of empirical data than any theorist up to his time, and is a worthy candidate for the forerunner of sociology. It is difficult to call him the founder of sociology, however, merely because no one followed in his footsteps for another several centuries.

The founder of sociology is generally held to be Auguste Comte (1798-1857), the French philosopher of science who first defined it. The origins of sociology thus come directly out of the work of a philosopher, making the philosophy of sociology unique among the philosophies of science: In a very real sense, it predates the science it studies. Comte had originally used the term “social physics,” but later used “sociology” when social physics was borrowed by other writers and applied in ways he had not intended.

What he intended for sociology was for the knowledge and tools of psychology (then a new social science just beginning to develop its quantitative tools), economics, and history to be brought to bear on the problem of not only understanding the workings of human society but also improving the state of human existence. While philosophy was an “armchair science,” occupied with thought experiments and hypotheses that went untested, Comte’s vision of sociology was an applied social science that would not just study society but change it for the better.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) rejected many of Comte’s conclusions but was similarly motivated to apply the gains of knowledge and philosophy to transforming society through a scientific study of it. His work on labor and class struggle offered a critique of capitalism, breaking from the Great Man view of history, which portrayed history as the work of specific individuals, and thus its histories of tyrannical leaders in favor of what he called the despotism of capital.

In Comte and Marx’s footsteps came the classical liberal political theorist Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who rejected claims of both and proposed a three-stage evolution of human society inspired by the evolutionary thought of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck: militant (simple and homogeneous), industrial (complex and heterogeneous), and either anarchy (in his original theory) or a minimized form of the state (in the later form of his theory).

Further Insights

Key to Comte’s conception of sociology was his belief that scientific laws could be discovered that governed the social world. Two of the oldest theories in the modern philosophy of science are empiricism and positivism. Empiricism holds that the physical senses are the most important (and perhaps the only) source of knowledge, a view that informs what we think of as “the scientific method” and its insistence on empirical evidence. Originally developed when the only “sciences” were what we now call the natural sciences (such as physics, chemistry, and biology), the demands of empiricism inform the social sciences’ reliance on empirical evidence. This evidence is in the form of data and in manipulations of that data, such as mathematical modeling and quantitative analysis.

Positivism is a related theory of knowledge holding that positive knowledge is grounded in empirical (sensory) experience, and interpreted by reason. One of the key claims of positivism is its rejection of intuition or divine revelation as sources of knowledge: true knowledge comes only from natural phenomena, which is to say, the physical world, outside the mind. By extension, it follows that the natural world must be governed by laws which, though they may be complex, are both general and consistent.

The modern form of positivism was articulated by Comte, who held that human societies are also governed by laws—not in the sense of human-created legal systems, but unwritten laws of large-scale human behavior. In a sense, this is the claim that founded sociology, just as psychology, developing around the same time, makes a similar claim about individual human behavior. That said, modern sociologists do not all subscribe to a strong version of positivism.

Evaluating the role of positivism in sociology has historically been one of the concerns of the philosophy of sociology. Peter Halfpenny found twelve different epistemological claims that fit somewhere on a spectrum of strong to weak positivism (Halfpenny, 1982). For instance, neo-positivist theory, which incorporated some nineteenth century positivist claims with the behaviorist theories of psychology and quantification methodologies, dominated much of American sociology in the mid-twentieth century.

Marx had rejected Comte’s positivism, under the influence of German philosopher Georg Hegel (1770-1831), who also rejected empiricism. As the first true sociologists began their work in Germany in the early twentieth century, they upheld this intellectual tradition, arguing in favor of anti-positivism. While positivism holds that there is some rational, objective, underlying law or truth governing human behavior, anti-positivism insists on conducting sociological research subjectively, and rejects the belief that the methodologies suited to the natural sciences are also best-suited to the social sciences. As with positivism, there are multiple versions of this claim; in fact, some claims in contemporary philosophy of sociology could seem either positivist or anti-positivist, from the perspective of the early sociologists, since over time the strongest version of any such theory rarely remains the most popularly held.

The criticisms made against Spencer’s efforts at adapting evolutionary thought to sociological thinking constitute early examples of work in the philosophy of sociology in the sense of an examination of a sociologist’s methods. Though it was Lamarck, not Darwin, that Spencer drew on, he was working in the mode of what is now grouped under the rubric of “social Darwinism”: various theories applying the evolutionary phenomena of natural selection and the survival of the fittest to the social world.

Social Darwinism is “history as written by the victors” in an extreme form. In its strongest expressions, it supports existing inequalities in society on the basis that the “fittest” have risen to the highest ranks of society, and has furthermore been used to argue that charity and social welfare systems—because they prolong the survival of the “unfit” and increase their likelihood of reproduction—are worse for society overall. Spencer did not himself make these claims, and wrote of social systems on a larger scale. His sociological work, however, supported a minimized role for the state on the grounds that natural law, enacting on human society, would result in the fittest society when it received the least interference.

Issues

In 1948, sociologist Kurt Heinrich Wolff (1912-2003) published his instrumental paper “The Unique and the General: Toward a Philosophy of Sociology.” Wolff was a sociologist of knowledge, a subfield concerned with the social and cultural context of knowledge and which itself intersects in concerns with the philosophy of sociology. Among the issues he addressed was the claim, less commonly made in the twenty-first century than at the time, that sociology is one of the natural sciences rather than one of the social sciences (Wolff, 1948).

In his discussion of how this conception of sociology—or, alternately, the social science conception of it—impacts the sociologist’s approach to their work, Wolff offers some of the earliest theoretical work in the philosophy of sociology since the initial birth and maturation of the field. His overall purpose is to find the common ground between these two conceptions, beginning with their insistence on scientific methods, in order to offer “a philosophy of sociology” that can guide the field.

Like Wolff, many philosophers of both sociology and science focus on an area of study called the social dimensions of scientific knowledge. These social dimensions include the effects research and new knowledge have on society as well as the effects social life and relationships have on research and learning. For instance, movements that emerge in the culture like feminism or the civil rights movement impact sociological research in numerous ways. At the most basic level they influence the demographics of the people who engage in sociological research. In turn, sociological research influences the discussion that transpires about specific issues raised by those movements. For example, in the area of women’s labor rights, focusing specifically on the gender-based wage gap requires that quantitative data be collected, interpreted, and brought to light by economists and sociologists.

The philosophy of sociology has been instrumental in identifying and addressing the three central dichotomies of sociological theory: synchrony and diachrony, structure and agency, and subjectivity and objectivity. Synchrony and diachrony are concepts originating in linguistics and bear on the question of how sociology approaches its subject with respect to the dimension of time. Synchrony analyzes a moment or snapshot of time, such as is revealed in a survey of social or political attitudes. Diachrony analyzes a sequence that takes place over time, such as examining the way social attitudes have changed. The dilemma is that these are not truly separate concerns for most sociologists, and integrating the results of diachronic and synchronic methodologies in a way everyone agrees on has proven challenging.

Structure and agency similarly positions two extremes against each other. Agency is an individual’s ability to act freely and make choices. Structure refers to the social structures in a society. The question is how much those structures limit agency. The core premises of sociology suggest an importance of structures, or there would be no call to study them. Few sociologists, however, support a purely deterministic view—one that gives all the power to social structures and none to the individuals that create them.

The problem of subjectivity and objectivity is perhaps the oldest in the philosophy of sociology, harkening back to Comte and Marx, but it considers the problem differently than the positivist/anti-positivist dispute. Comte’s claim that there were fixed and discoverable laws governing the social world assumes the possibility of an objective social science, an objective sociology. Skeptics of this objectivity question how objective a science can be when the scientist is part of the object of study.

A similar problem, addressed across philosophy of science but present in the philosophy of sociology from the beginning, is the core concern of what is now called social epistemology. Formally, social epistemology developed out of the work of positivists in the field of analytic philosophy in the early twentieth century, but its influences go back to John Stuart Mill in the mid-nineteenth century. Social epistemology is the study of the social dimensions of human knowledge, a pursuit undertaken by sociologists, philosophers, and philosophers of sociology alike.

Social epistemology is especially associated with “the strong programme,” a school of thought that originated at the University of Edinburgh and has been deeply influential on the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies, as exemplified by the work of philosopher Bruno Latour. The strong programme is best described as radical relativism—that is, an even stronger challenge to objectivity than Hegel’s or Marx’s, claiming that the facts revealed by science can only be understood as artifacts that are socially constructed, rather than being discovered.

Comte envisioned a sociology that did not simply study society but acted to transform it. In the strong programme’s view of sociology, to study society and disseminate sociological theories about it is to transform it. A “fact” is not revealed by critical analysis of quantitative and qualitative data; rather, it is a social phenomenon that sociologists disseminate into society, becoming “fact” because it becomes part of the consensus view. To put it another way, in the social epistemology of the strong programme, knowledge is not a representation but a justification. From this point of view, social science itself is not a search for truths, but a conversation. The strong programme is controversial, and not all approaches to social epistemology are so extreme.

More neutral forms of social epistemology simply examine the ways social interaction impact knowledge. For instance, one area interesting to philosophers and sociologists working in social epistemology is the way laypeople in a subject view experts. What are the social cues that a layperson uses to recognize expertise? What social skills come into play in listening to two experts disagree with each other on a subject about which the listener has no prior knowledge?

A similar scenario of interest removes the layperson and shifts the emphasis. What happens when peers disagree about knowledge? For example, when two sociologists begin with the same raw data and arrive at different conclusions, how does their conversation about the disagreement progress? Like the layperson scenario, this is still a disagreement between experts, but the object of interest is not the set of cues or skills implicated in the layperson’s evaluation, but the social activity between the two experts—no longer a performance, but a dialogue. Neither of these examples is purely hypothetical. They occur in sociology and other scholarly fields all the time, and part of the work of philosophers of sociology is to look for ways to address them.

Terms & Concepts

Behaviorism: A school of thought explaining human or animal behavior with reference to conditioning and responses to stimuli.

Empirical Evidence: Evidence that can be demonstrated and observed by the senses.

Empiricism: The theory that knowledge is derived from sensory information.

Epistemology: The branch of philosophy that studies human knowledge; also any specific theory of knowledge.

Positivism: The theory that knowledge is grounded in empirical evidence and interpreted by reason.

Sociology: The study of human societies and large-scale human behavior.

Bibliography

Adler, J. (2014). Sociology as an art form: One facet of the conservative sociology of Robert Nisbet. American Sociologist, 45(1), 8–21. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=95615800&site=ehost-live

Doran, N. (2015). Beyond phenomenological anti-sociologies: Foucault’s “care of his self” as standpoint sociology. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 40(2), 131–161. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=108278728&site=ehost-live

Halfpenny, P. (1982). Positivism and Sociology: Explaining Social Life. London, UK: Allen and Unwin.

Horowitz, I. L. (1993). The phenomenal world of Kurt H. Wolff. Human Studies, 16(3), 325–328. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=9312293200&site=ehost-live

Imber, J. B. (1996). The vocation of Kurt H. Wolff: Reflections on critical subjectivity in sociology. Human Studies, 19(3), 337–342. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=9702146383&site=ehost-live

Migliorati, L. (2015). Maurice Halbwachs: Classical sociology after the classics. Italian Sociological Review, 5(2), 251–271. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=109952613&site=ehost-live

Ostrow, J. M. (1993). Introduction to the essays on Kurt H. Wolff. Human Studies, 16(3), 301–303. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=9312293197&site=ehost-live

Wolff, K. H. (1948). The unique and the general. Philosophy of Science, 15(3), 192–210.

Wotherspoon, T. (2015). Knowledge and salvation for a troubled world: Sociology and the conference on science, philosophy and religion. American Sociologist, 46(3), 373–413. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=108899333&site=ehost-live

Philosophy of Sociology

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Subject Terms

Philosophy of Sociology

Abstract

Overview

Further Insights

Issues

Terms & Concepts

Bibliography

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