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PPt on Sociology kslu notes talcott parsons, Exercises of Sociology of Sciences

Bangalore UniversitySociology of Sciences

structural functions empirical functions and neo class

Typology: Exercises

2022/2023

Uploaded on 02/11/2023

SadanandS
SadanandS 🇮🇳

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MEANING OF SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
A sociological theory is a supposition that intends to
consider, analyze, and/or explain objects of social reality
from a sociological perspective, drawing connections
between individual concepts in order to organize and
substantiate sociological knowledge.
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MEANING OF SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

A sociological theory is a supposition that intends to

consider, analyze, and/or explain objects of social reality

from a sociological perspective, drawing connections

between individual concepts in order to organize and

substantiate sociological knowledge.

NATURE OF SOCIOLOGICAL THEORIES

  • (^) Sociologists develop theories to explain social phenomena. A theory is a proposed relationship between two or more concepts. In other words, a theory is explanation for why or how a phenomenon occurs.
  • (^) Attempts to explain how the social world operates. This social world consists of the behaviors, interactions, and patterns of social organization among humans, although some would argue that a sociology of non human animals that organize is also possible.

SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

  • (^) A sociological theory is a supposition that intends to consider, analyze, and/or explain objects of social reality from a sociological perspective drawing connections between individual concepts in order to organize and substantiate sociological knowledge. Hence, such knowledge is composed of complex theoretical frameworks and methodology.
  • (^) These theories range in scope, from concise, yet thorough, descriptions of a single social process to broad, inconclusive paradigms for analysis and interpretation. Some sociological theories explain aspects of the social world and enable prediction about future events, while others function as broad perspectives which guide further sociological analyses.

PROMINENT SOCIAL THINKERS/PIONEERS OF SOCIOLOGY

  • (^) Prominent sociological theorists include Talcott Parsons,

Robert K. Merton, Randall Collins, James Samuel Coleman

, Peter Blau, Niklas Luhmann, Marshal McLuhan,

Immanuel Wallerstein, George Homans, Harrison White,

Theda Skocpol, Gerhard Lenski, Pierre van den Berghe and

Jonathan H. Turner.

  • (^) Science is a belief system, but it is obviously not the only set of beliefs that influence people perceptions and judgments. There are different types of knowledge possessed by humans, and science is only one of several types, which means, inevitably, that science as a way of knowing about the world will sometimes clash with knowledge generated by other belief systems.
  • (^) Sociologists study social events, interactions, and patterns, and they develop a theory in an attempt to explain why things work as they do. In sociology, a theory is a way to explain different aspects of social interactions and to create a testable proposition, called a hypothesis, about society
  • (^) Similarly, scientific theories are not about a particular form of government but about the nature of power as a basic social force.
  • (^) In sociology, a few theories provide broad perspectives that help explain many different aspects of social life, and these are called paradigms
  • (^) sociological theory is formalized and finally testable explanations that are accumulated to a huge extent in the normal procedure for Sociology Research i. e. sociological theory must be related to Sociological Research. Our theories may only try to explain limited and specific properties of reality.
  • (^) Social theory by definition is used to make distinctions and generalizations among different types of societies, and to analyse modernity as it has emerged in the past few centuries.
  • (^) Social theory as it is recognized today emerged in the 20th century as a distinct discipline, and was largely equated with an attitude of critical thinking and the desire for knowledge through a posteriori methods of discovery, rather than a priori methods of tradition
  • (^) Their goal is to promote accurate communication, rigorous testing, high accuracy, and broad applicability. They include the following: absence of contradictions, absence of ambivalence, abstractness, generality, precision, parsimony, and conditionality." Therefore, a social theory consists of well- defined terms, statements, arguments and scope conditions.
  • (^) social theory can also be thought of as incorporating normative concerns bearing on debates about desirable ends or values of social life—about how social life ideally “ought to be”—in ways that overlap closely with concerns in the fields of moral, political, and legal philosophy.
  • (^) Blurry boundaries affect social science, and there are prominent scholars who could be seen as being in between social and sociological theories, such as Harold Garfinkel, Herbert Blumer, and Claude Lévi-Strauss.

CONCEPTS

  • (^) Concepts are defined as abstract ideas or general notions that occur in the mind, in speech, or in thought.
  • (^) They are understood to be the fundamental building blocks of thoughts and beliefs.
  • (^) They play an important role in all aspects of cognition.
  • (^) concepts are studied by several disciplines, such as linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, and these disciplines are interested in the logical and psychological structure of concepts, and how they are put together to form thoughts and sentences
  • (^) The study of concepts has served as an important flagship of an emerging interdisciplinary approach called cognitive science.
  • (^) Concepts can be organized into a hierarchy, higher levels of which

are termed "superordinate" and lower levels termed "subordinate".

Additionally, there is the "basic" or "middle" level at which people

will most readily categorize a concept. For example, a basic-level

concept would be "chair", with its superordinate, "furniture", and its

subordinate, "easy chair".

  • (^) A concept is instantiated (reified) by all of its actual or potential

instances, whether these are things in the real world or other ideas.

  • (^) Concepts are studied as components of human cognition in the

cognitive science disciplines of linguistics, psychology and,

philosophy, where an ongoing debate asks whether all cognition must

occur through concepts.

  • (^) Concepts are used as formal tools or models in mathematics,

computer science, databases and artificial intelligence where they

are sometimes called classes, schema or categories. In informal use

the word concept often just means any idea.

  • (^) They are scientific tools.
  • (^) Paradigms cannot occur or happen!
  • (^) Societies are not Conflictalist, Functionalist, or Symbolic

Interactionist. People and social events are not based on paradigms:

a paradigm is a viewpoint, a perspective, a guiding principal, a belief

system

  • (^) Paradigms cannot be proven or disproven, but they lead to the

development of theories which are provable.

  • (^) Sociological paradigms are particular paradigms that employ

the sociological perspective and the sociological imagination. ...

A sociological paradigm usually refers to the broad schools of

thought in sociology that encompass multiple theories from the same

perspective.