What is science? Do you think that the methods used in natural sciences can be applied to sociology? Give reasons for your answer. (Answer in 350 words)

- What is science? Do you think that the methods used in natural sciences can be applied to sociology? Give reasons for your answer. (Answer in 350 words)
Introduction
Science is a procedure rather than a subject matter, and sociology can borrow the procedure without borrowing the laboratory.

Body

1. What science is: Systematic observation, concepts defined so that others can use them identically, hypotheses exposed to evidence that could refute them, and conclusions held provisionally. Popper made falsifiability the line between science and dogma; Kuhn added that normal science works inside a paradigm and changes by revolution rather than by accumulation. Merton described its social organisation as universalism, common ownership of findings, disinterestedness and organised scepticism. Publicity is the core of it: a result must be checkable by strangers.

2. Reasons the methods carry into sociology: Society shows regularities that do not depend on the observer — birth rates, suicide rates, migration streams, patterns of mobility — and these are facts requiring explanation. Durkheim demonstrated the point in Suicide, using official statistics from Catholic and Protestant regions to support integration as the cause, with the comparative method standing in for the experiment. The apparatus works: probability sampling, standardised schedules, tests of significance and panel studies. India's National Family Health Survey and Periodic Labour Force Survey produce measures that different teams reproduce, and randomised trials of teaching and health interventions have settled questions argument could not.

3. Reasons they cannot, or only in part: The objects have meanings and the objects answer back. Action must be interpreted and not merely observed, which is Weber's point, and Winch argued that following a rule is not a natural regularity. Society is an open system, so nothing can be held constant and laws appear only as tendencies. Being studied alters behaviour, as the Hawthorne experiments showed, and Giddens's double hermeneutic returns findings to the people they describe. Experiment on human beings is limited by ethics, and values enter the choice of problem and the categories — what counts as unemployment, or as a household.

4. My answer, with its conditions: Yes in part. Sociology can be scientific in procedure — explicit concepts, evidence that could refute, public method — without being naturalistic in ambition. What it cannot import is the closed experiment and the expectation of universal law. Critical realism states the compromise: real causal mechanisms working in open systems, visible as tendencies rather than constant conjunctions.

Conclusion
Sociology earns the name science by how it argues, not by how closely it imitates physics.