ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book argues that sociology is, in its actual practice as well as its abstract design, one of the natural sciences–that is, much more akin to biology, chemistry, and physics than to philosophy, poetry, or religion–and everything in it should be regarded as explicating this view. It addresses what makes scientific sociology "sociology," namely, its substance or empirical referents, and also addresses what makes scientific sociology "scientific," namely, its form or procedure. The book sets forth principles for specifying the empirical referents of sociological description. Here a generic definition of social phenomena is proposed, and that definition is then broken down into four components: social structure, cultural structure, spatial regularity, and temporal regularity. The book examines how each of these components may be hierarchically aggregated and how different levels in each such hierarchy may be determined.
