1.    WHAT IS SCIENCE?  My overall goal on this blog is to introduce and develop the concept of sociology as a science.  The first step, then, is to explain what “we” mean by science.  I use “we” instead of “I” for two reasons.  The first and most basic reason is that the “I” is a grammatical illusion.  Humans are radically social beings.  This is a key concept in sociology and one I will explain in an early section as I unfold what we mean by the sociological imagination.  The immediate point is that science is a social activity. 

2.    Let’s consider the question of whether a Robison Crusoe could become a scientist or could do science.  Considered by some to be the first English novel, Daniel DeFoe’s 1719 story of Crusoe being stranded on an island has served philosophers who pondered the question of an individual scientist.  There are two basic answers: (1) no, because scientific criticism, progress, and objectivity depend on cooperation, intersubjectivity, and public method; (2) yes, because our Crusoe scientist could substitute the satisfactoriness and coherence of the laws he derived.  Notice however that this could only be possible contingently if this second Crusoe had become a scientist on the mainland first.

3.    All knowledge claims escape their evidence and must be considered highly presumptive, corrigible, and fallible.  There is no justification for investing any scientific claim with positive or absolute belief.  This limits deterministic, universal, and invariant claims.  It does not eliminate them. The reason is that without certain levels of closure in the systems of our everyday lives life would be impossible.  Philosophically, we might be justified in claiming that definitive descriptions are impossible.  But levels of closure make definitive descriptions in practice possible.                                       

4.    I am only a scientist and my work is only scientific when we enter the historical flow of the generations of scientists collectively intersubjectively testing ideas, theories, and experimental results.  At the end of the day, I am an experiment, my work is an experiment, and my claims are an experiment.  However certain I am of their truth, this is ultimately a collective decision of the evolving scientific community.  

5.    Humans exist in objectivity or truth communities.  I am currently writing a book about three such communities, the community of atheists, the community of theists, and my community of sociologically minded scientists.  There are overlaps across these communities but they are more closed than open and operative effectively as cultural species.  This view helps explain why communication across these communities is difficult to impossible.  We are one (presumably) biological species, but many cultural species.  

SOCIOLOGY AS A SCIENCE

 

1.    The science of sociology is based on the discovery that humans arrive on the evolutionary stage as social organisms: always, already, and everywhere social.  They are the latest stage in evolution’s experiment with collective cooperative systems as adaptive mechanisms.  The cooperative principle is in the ascendance in evolution.  This experiment begins with the invention of cellular cooperation.  Life on earth existed in single-celled forms until about 600 million years ago.  Then, the Paleozoic Age witnessed the proliferation of multicellular animals. This new complexity had survival advantages over single-celled life forms.  The earliest forms of multicellular animals were the sponges.  As complexity and collective cooperative forms evolve, life forms lose the capacity to regenerate cells, tissues, and limbs.  After the sponges came jelly fish and sea anemones with a central gut cavity, followed by flatworms that innovated bilateral symmetry and the beginnings of nerves concentrated in rudimentary brains.  Roundworms came along next with elementary circulatory systems.  They also have a mouth, hollow gut, and an anus.

2.     Lamp shells, clams and oysters evolved next; then segmented worms, and then the anthropods (lobsters, insects, spiders, and so on).  They added armor to their segmented structure that was more protective than the coverings of shellfish.  Some multicellular plants began to grow tops over the water’s surface and eventually evolved into land animals.  An increase in the  percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere supported intense plant growth across the planet.  This was the landscape that became hospitable to the first multicellular animals.                                   


 

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