philosophy

philosophy As an intellectual activity, philosophy is the most broad-ranging of the academic disciplines, since it addresses a wide range of interlinked questions about the nature of understanding, logic, language, and causality, many of which occur in the various other sciences. The sociologist is most likely to encounter philosophical debate in the fields of epistemology and ethics—both of which branches of philosophy are dealt with elsewhere in this dictionary.

The philosophy of the social sciences is a recognized specialism among sociologists, and asks questions about (among other things) the processes of concept-formation, the relationships between theory and evidence, the place of values, nature of motivation, role of language, and the nature of proof in the social sciences generally and sociology in particular. Again, many of the most significant arguments and most influential schools of thought concerning these issues have been treated separately, as discrete items in this dictionary.

It has sometimes been argued that much of what passes as sociological theory (for example in the works of Anthony Giddens) is actually social philosophy, since it consists mainly of metaphysical speculation about the human condition, rather than concrete or testable propositions about social life. However, this is probably a minority view, although there is quite widespread agreement that sociology has in the past (most obviously during the 1960s) suffered from an excessive reflexivity and obsession with exploring the epistemological foundations of the discipline. See also HISTORIOGRAPHY; METHODOLOGICAL PLURALISM.