ABSTRACT
Methodology is too important to be left to methodologists. Although some distinguished methodologists and philosophers of science believe that methodology should devote itself to explicating and improving contemporary sociological practice, conventional methodology does not ordinarily do so. Sheer technical description constitutes the first and most primitive form of methodological writing in sociology. Such writings are really no more than "how to do it" treatises, describing what practical men in our discipline have found to be useful ways to do research. A most striking feature of the specialty of methodology to a non-methodologist is its focus on a relatively small number of problems, chosen from among all the problems of method that sociologists in fact have to contend with. Developing hypotheses is a complex procedure, but one that can be explained so that others can carry it out as well. Generations of sociologists somehow manage to develop the hypotheses they eventually test.
