Due to the predominance of orthodox positivism in contemporary sociological circles merit of the phenomenological movement in sociology is that it has again raised a number of key issues concerning the nature of the sociological enterprise. These problems cannot be called entirely new, because some of them accompanied by a case study from its very origin. Really new is that these issues should now be more interested practitioners, sociologists, philosophers than the social sciences.
Recently, the attention of most social scientists is sent to the improvement of private procedures and techniques of "scientific" sociology, rather than on learning assumptions that underpin this very sociology. In defense of this position can certainly say that from the empirical studies use much more than from the arguments about what should be sociology. However, this argument depends on the quality of the "scientific" sociology of results; namely, it's the reason it was that caused the concern of sociologists of the phenomenological direction. Disillusionment with the traditional sociology arose directly in the practical research work, and not the result of abstract reasoning that "otherwise would have been better." Phenomenological sociology, therefore, seeks to revise the objectives of the sociological enterprise. To show the failure of "scientific" judgments about the nature of social phenomena, there is no point in waiting another methodological turn, because now it is clear that this path leads nowhere.
In contrast to the phenomenological sociology of positivism advocates believe that sociology should constitute itself as a scientific discipline on the model of the natural sciences. Although there are several varieties of positivism in sociology and their supporters agree on three fundamental premises on which the approach in general:
(1) social phenomena in terms of any analytical problem qualitatively the same as natural phenomena;
(2) methods of analysis developed in the natural sciences, applied in the case study;
(3) The task of sociology is to develop a system of highly generalized, empirically based theoretical principles which should form the basis for the prediction of social phenomena. |