Gabrielle Hunt - Alternative Topic 4

Gabrielle Hunt

23 April 2012

Alternative Topic 4

Sociology

Somewhere in the first class meeting, on the 17^th of April, it came up that there should be some intersection of philosophy and psychology, where the poetic nature of philosophy meets the concrete nature of psychology. I would posit that this central section of the Venn diagram should be considered sociological theory. As an early sociology student, I always felt that many sociological theories were highly philosophical and left much to be desired in the way of scientific “proof.” As an upperclassman sociology student, I’ve found that this first impression was far from true.

For instance, let’s consider differential association. Differential association is a theory first put forth by Sutherland, which states that people learn crime from the people they associate with, their significant peer groups, families, etcetera. He designates a long series of points outlining his theory, such as that associations vary on the basis of priority, intensity, frequency, and duration or that strain to accomplish goals is not an excuse for crime, because many people feel strain to accomplish their goals and do not resort to committing crimes in order to do so. What Sutherland did was take a higher concept (such as that humans are different from animals) and apply it to human behavior (psychology) to emerge with a blend of the two (humans are different because we learn through a process more complex than simple monkey-see-monkey-do). Sutherland’s theory is not completely supported by empirical data, because many of its points are untestable, as they are only visible after the crime has been committed and cannot be used as a predicting factor. Regardless, this testability is the more concrete side that the fellow student I was speaking with felt there should be when talking about philosophy.