ABSTRACT
Science claims superiority over other kinds of knowledge on the grounds that it is derived from the observation and recording of phenomena. A more fundamental attack on the position that sociology is a natural science comes from those who argue that human beings differ in a crucially significant way from molecules—they are conscious beings whose actions have meaning for them. In the social sciences, the concept of function has more generally been used in a way borrowed from biology. Science involves the abstraction of some characteristics from complex reality and the attempt to establish laws about the probability of there being regular relationships between such variables. The methods of science have proved their power in the field of the natural sciences. The ends to which the knowledge of science is applied may be good or ill.
