Modernity & Post-Modernity, Sociology as a Science | Sociology for A Level - Year 13 PDF Download

Modernity & Post-Modernity

The ‘Modernist’ Era

Key Features of Modernism:

• The Nation State: During the Modernist era, countries formed political units with their own sovereignty. Each nation typically shared a common language and culture within its borders.
• Growth of Science and Rationalisation: The influence of religious beliefs, dominant in traditional societies, declined. A new emphasis on science and rational thinking emerged as the prevailing belief system.
• Individualism: While social class, gender, and ethnicity continued to categorize people, individuals experienced greater personal freedom compared to traditional societies.

Postmodernism

• Postmodernism and Globalisation: Postmodernists argue that the Modernist era has been transformed, primarily due to globalisation. They suggest that global interconnectedness has reduced the significance of distinct nation states.
• Decline of the Nation State: Nation states no longer hold complete autonomy due to the influence of global political organizations, such as the United Nations and the European Union. Postmodernists argue that these changes signal the end of modernism, necessitating new theories like postmodernism to understand contemporary society.
• The ‘Death of the Social’: Postmodernists, including Jean Baudrillard, contend that society is experiencing the ‘death of the social.’ For some individuals, interaction with the outside world occurs solely through media, which shapes their worldview.
• Loss of Community: The traditional need for a sense of community has become outdated and irrelevant. Baudrillard describes this shift as the ‘death of the social,’ highlighting the erosion of communal ties.

Sociology as a Science

Positivists assert that sociology qualifies as a science, while interpretivists and postmodernists argue it does not.

Positivism

• Auguste Comte pioneered positivism, a theoretical framework emphasizing scientific principles to explain society through objectivity, reliability, and generalizability, derived from quantitative data. 
• Positivists maintain that cause-and-effect relationships can be identified, where a specific event or change consistently produces the same outcome.

Induction

• Emile Durkheim, a functionalist influenced by Comte, applied positivism in his study of suicide. 
• He employed induction, collecting extensive statistical data to identify trends and patterns that reveal the influence of specific "social facts" on society.

The Hypothetico-Deductive Model

• In his research, Durkheim utilized official statistics and the hypothetico-deductive model, where a researcher begins with a hypothesis they aim to confirm.

Interpretivism

• Interpretivists argue that studying human behavior scientifically is flawed because human actions are unpredictable and carry complex meanings.

Verstehen

• To gain a valid understanding of an individual's experiences, interpretivists advocate for Verstehen, a method where researchers abandon objectivity to empathize with their subjects by imagining themselves in their position.

Critical

• Interpretivists critique science as a discipline, arguing it lacks validity. 
• They believe sociology should distance itself from scientific methods to maintain its integrity.

Postmodernism and Sociology

• Positivists view sociology as a science, but interpretivists and postmodernists disagree, asserting it neither is nor should aspire to be a science.

Postmodernists

• Postmodernists align with interpretivists, rejecting sociology as a science. 
• They see science as a "meta-narrative," a broad theory that oversimplifies by attempting to categorize all individuals uniformly.

Jean-Francois Lyotard

• Lyotard argues that such overarching belief systems are irrelevant in today’s fragmented postmodern society, where no single truth holds universal acceptance.

Karl Popper

• Karl Popper also contends that sociology is not a science. 
• However, he views science positively, crediting its dominance to rapid advancements during and after the Enlightenment.

Verificationism

• Popper rejected the positivist reliance on verificationism, calling it the "fallacy of induction," arguing it is irrelevant to scientific progress.

Falsification

• Popper proposed that scientists should aim to disprove their theories rather than confirm them, a process called falsification. 
• He argued that a theory’s accuracy increases the longer it withstands attempts to disprove it.