The social world is a world of multiple realities: different individuals focus on different aspects of social situations and so many ways, "read through" (explain) at first glance, the same situation. One such reality is the reality posed by explanatory procedures of positivist sociology.
The social world, so the world is organized on the basis of the values taken for granted that individuals use as a general scheme of interpretation and explanation of the phenomena of this world (events, actions, situations, etc.). Under the social structure, therefore, refers to typical participants understanding of the social structure, are the product of the general scheme of interpretation, the set of constitutive socially standardized and standardizing visible, but do not notice the background of expectations, giving individuals an opportunity meaningfully to perceive the world. The most important conclusion is that the sociologist, in contrast to a naturalist cannot accept on faith argument on the availability of pre-constituted world of phenomena for study, because the process by which the social world becomes available to researchers (i.e., constitutes) itself should be subject to investigation. It follows that the task of sociology is the study of the processes of constructing the social world. And for this it is necessary to refrain from believing in the existence of this world as objective reality.
The main difficulty of positivist sociology is rooted in its inability to refrain from this belief. In this sense it is closely connected with the natural setting, which reduces any investigation to identify the objective properties of the received faith in the real social world. And since the problems faced by the sociologist and the ordinary members of society, are the same, sociology can be regarded as a further explanation of everyday social world. How ordinary people create the objective reality as a result of the practical application of the procedures of interpretation of the first order, and sociologists producing this kind of reality, applying their explanatory procedure. And in fact, in both cases, these procedures are documenting nature: events, actions, situational factors are considered as evidence for the existence and the product of some underlying fundamental factors or patterns. If you compare the reality posed by the sociologist and the reality created by other individuals, it appears that we have no reason to trust first than last, because they likewise have no existence outside the processes of interpretation in which they were designed. Moreover, the processes of sociological construction can serve as the actual material to be investigated as well as other constructs of individuals. In this sense, the explanation put forward by the positivist sociology are a variety of mundane explanations, and positivist sociology itself - a kind of "popular" science. |