What is a sociological question

Q. What do sociologists do?

A. They ask and answer sociological questions OR they explore sociological interests.

Q #1. What is a sociological question?

A. It is a question about the social or a question that has the social as its topic, subject matter, or thematic content.

Q. What is the social?

A. It is not a certain type of material, thing, or entity, but rather it is the associations between materials, things, or entities of all different types (e.g., chemical, physical, psychological, legal, biological, architectural, etc.). In other words, it is symbiosis or interaction. E.g., Observe the relation between SARS and human beings. SARS is clearly an entity that biology explores, but it enters into the realm of sociology as soon as it affects the associations that humans are part of. What happens when you get SARS? You must be quarantined away from the life that you once lived, from your loved ones, from your friends, etc. It is as if SARS was giving orders to you and all of the other associates in your life: “Don’t see your family. Don’t see your friends. Don’t go where you want to go.” Of course, this is a simplification but the basic idea still remains – SARS, which belongs to the realm of biology, also belongs to the realm of sociology because it rearranges social life, i.e., the associations that humans form with each other.

Q #2. What is a sociological question?

A. It is a question about the phenomenon of association. E.g., “How are things associated?” “How does this association, symbiosis, or interaction work?” “How does SARS change the way that people interact?”

Q. What is an interaction?

A. It is an acting-together, a concert, an ensemble of things. It is that phenomenon in which things make each other act or perform some specific action – this includes phenomena in which things allow each other to act, not merely phenomenon in which things cause each other to act. Therefore, sociology is the study of action or work, of labor and division of labor. “How do things act together?” “Which entities and their actions made this person perform this action?”

Q. What is the range or domain of sociology, given the above definitions?

A. Any and all symbioses that humans can study. However, more conservative and anthropocentric versions of sociology tend to require that humans be one of the entities associated in the associations that they study, and most tend to require that humans be the focus – even to the point of neglecting all nonhuman entities involved in an interaction with humans. E.g., this latter type of sociology might study war but only focus on human bodies, their movements, their cognition, etc. while neglecting the landscape that they traverse in the uncountable technologies that they bring into play. War cannot happen without these technologies or these landscapes, but some sociologists behave as if it could.

Q. What is intersubjectivity?

A. An intersubjective interaction is one in which humans act directly upon other humans, perhaps with no more mediation than that of sunlight (to mediate visual interaction) and atmosphere (to mediate verbal interaction). E.g., fistfights, sex, face-to-face conversations, face-to-face dating, face-to-face… Etc.

Q. What is interobjectivity?

A. An interobjective interaction is one in which humans act indirectly upon other humans, in the sense that they act directly upon nonhumans (i.e., objects), which in their turn act directly or indirectly upon humans (i.e., subjects) at the other end of the interaction. I might go so far as to assume that most human interactions are interobjective, as opposed to intersubjective. A sort of common sense proof of this would be to think about all of the objects that you use and all of the people that made and delivered these objects, and then to ask “How many of these people have I ever even met?”

Q. Why do sociologists need to take into account interobjectivity?

A. In order to study associations (or societies) and how they work, one must take into account ALL of the participants. To exclude objects from studies would be to fail to be object-ive because practically every interaction involving humans is full of objects (and objectors) – in order to be objective, sociologists must be object-ful. Imagine if mechanics were to pick and choose which parts of your car they would pay attention to, regardless of whether or not they were part of the problem; they would have a hard time figuring out how the problem worked and how to rework it into a solution. Thus…

Q #3. What is a sociological question?

A. It is a question that explores how humans and nonhumans work together to form associations (or societies).