ABSTRACT
Vision, in contrast to mere sight, is the capacity to see things unconventionally and more profoundly than others, partly by possessing a wider visual span. Seeing phenomena in relation to others, or within some wider context, is the very meaning of sociological vision and a certain mode of vision emerged as part of the naturalist perspective. Putting the individual in a group context, the group in communal, historical, or societal contexts are prime projects of sociologists, and such placement requires the naive or trained capacity to see things in that way. Chicagoans prepared the way for a repudiation of the concept of pathology, but did not themselves explicitly participate in purging sociology of that idea. As long as correctional presumptions lingered, the intricate relations among conventional and deviant phenomena could not attain conceptual or theoretical prominence. To stress overlap is to magnify the awareness that persons with conventional public reputations participate, either frequently or occasionally, in deviant activity.
