Is sociology a natural science?

Abstract

Sociologists have always tried to shape their science according to the model of the natural sciences. Critics of sociology object that sociology is not yet and never will be a science of this type. By "natural science" they mean physics, though they do not say so. They ignore other natural sciences, like geology, geography, and meteorology, which deal with objects just as complex and resistant to precision as social phenomena are. In reality, sociology can make studies of both types: precise measurements of small social units and their causal explanation, as in physics, and estimates and low correlations of more complex phenomena, as in geology.