(a) From the viewpoint of growing importance of multidisciplarity, how do you relate sociology to other social sciences ? 20 (b)…

Sociology occupies an integrative epistemic position within the social sciences. While multidisciplinarity juxtaposes separate disciplines and interdisciplinarity integrates their insights, transdisciplinarity transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries altogether. In this matrix, sociology functions as a bridge discipline. C. Wright Mills conceptualized the sociological imagination precisely to link personal biography with public issues, connecting individual experiences to broader structural and historical currents.

Sociology and Other Social Sciences

Sociology relates to other social sciences by interrogating their unexamined social preconditions. In relation to economics, sociology rejects the reductionist model of homo economicus; Karl Polanyi demonstrated that economic transactions are fundamentally embedded in social networks and institutions, forming the basis of modern economic sociology. In political science, sociology moved analysis beyond formal constitutional machinery toward political sociology, examining power structures, elite dominance, and social movements.

With social anthropology, the traditional division between modern industrial societies and simple non-Western communities has dissolved through shared ethnographic methods and the cultural turn. Sociology intersects with psychology through social psychology; G.H. Mead illustrated that the self is fundamentally social, emerging through symbolic interaction. Finally, historical sociology bridges sociology and history, moving past mere event-chronology to examine structural transformations over time, as seen in E.P. Thompson's history from below.

Positivism: Justification and Limits

Sociologists are justified in using positivism to uncover macro-level structural regularities. Auguste Comte placed sociology atop his hierarchy of sciences, arguing social dynamics follow discoverable laws. Émile Durkheim systematized this in The Rules of Sociological Method, treating social facts as external, coercive things amenable to inductive analysis. Durkheim’s study of Suicide demonstrated that individual acts are causally driven by social integration and moral regulation. In modern research, positivist methodologies remain essential: Robert Putnam quantitatively measured social capital to explain institutional performance, and large-scale data like National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) surveys map structural poverty and mobility.

However, positivism is fundamentally limited because human subjects possess reflexivity, agency, and internal meaning. Max Weber argued that social action requires Verstehen (interpretive understanding), which cannot be captured through external causal laws alone. Alfred Schutz’s phenomenology and postmodern theorists further showed that positivist data often reifies transient social constructs. In India, colonial positivist enumeration through the Census mischaracterized caste as a fixed, rigid category. In contrast, subaltern studies and field sociologists revealed caste to be a fluid, negotiated, and historically contingent relational construct. Positivism is thus justified only as a partial tool for macro-structural mapping, requiring interpretive methods for contextual depth.

Sociology and Common Sense

Sociology differs fundamentally from common sense. While common sense is sporadic, localized, naturalizing, and susceptible to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, sociology employs systematic methodological doubt, empirical testing, and conceptual rigor. Furthermore, Anthony Giddens identified the double hermeneutic, wherein sociological knowledge continually filters into, disrupts, and reconstructs lay common sense.

In the Indian context, common sense assumes that urbanization inevitably causes the breakdown of the joint family. Sociological research by A.M. Shah and Patricia Uberoi disproves this by demonstrating household complexity, cyclical transformation, and enduring functional jointness. Similarly, common sense often treats communal riots as spontaneous primordial flare-ups; sociological analyses by Paul Brass and Ashutosh Varshney explain them causally through institutionalized riot systems and the absence of cross-cutting civic networks.

Sociology establishes its distinctive disciplinary identity by synthesizing insights across disciplines, balancing empirical-positivist rigor with interpretive sensitivity, and systematically unmasking naturalized common-sense assumptions to explain the underlying mechanisms of social reality.