Positivism In Sociology

The debate that Sociology is a science of society has lasted for many years. A cultural movement of intellectuals occurred in the 17th and 18th century as they placed reason and individuality ahead of tradition and religion, this was known as The Age of Enlightenment. Intellectuals began to tackle traditional understandings of nature and society through scientific reasoning and methods. “Sociology has been variously defined as the science of human relations, of the phenomena of social interaction, of social forms, of group interpretation, or simply as the science of society” (Sorokin 1931).The scientific method was seen as a way of controlling and understanding the world through empirical research. This became one of the main ways that science

Positivism is a theory of knowledge, according to which the only kind of sound knowledge available to humankind is that of science, grounded in observation. Positivism, is a unity of science thesis, according to which all sciences can be integrated into a single natural system". (Halfpenny p.15). This means Positivism can be explained as the scientific study of social behaviour through empirical observation to generate laws to understand how society operates, and predict what direction it 's going in. It is a philosophical perspective of the world that allows past events to be explained through logic and reasoning which allows us to gain insight and predict future

So when the issue of suicide arises they don’t believe that it can be defined just as a statistic, they would look for reasons as to why the victim took their own life and therefore would look for evidence, for example a suicide note. Therefore the Interpretivists arguments is still extremely relevant because society and individuals have too many variables and external and internal factors which cannot be measured scientifically. Therefore, even though Sociology tries to take a scientific approach, if the results can’t be measured scientifically, then this in turn means Sociology itself can’t be