Sociology: Proscience or Antiscience?
回应了对社会学科学地位的批评，论证了社会学能够通过拓宽科学概念来建立普遍解释模型，并指出社会学知识确实在进步。
Criticisms of the scientific status of sociology possess some validity when applied against narrowly positivist interpretations of sociological methods and metatheory, but do not undermine the scientific project offormulating generalized explanatory models. (1) Critics allege that sociology has made no lawful findings; but valid general principles exist in many areas. (2) Situational interpretation, subjectivity, reflexivity, and emergence are alleged to undermine explanatory sociology, but these topics themselves can be explained by a widened conception of science that allows informal procedures in theorizing aimed at maximizing explanatory coherence. (3) The fact that intellectual discourse itself is a historically changeable social product does not invalidate objective explanatory knowledge. (4) The historicist claim that there can be no principles that hold across particular times and places is invalid and rests upon a confusion of underlying generative principles with the complexities of the empirical surface of history. (5) Metatheoretical criticism of the concept of causality does not undermine a sophisticated conception of scientific sociology. Sociological knowledge can and does advance, but it depends upon building the coherence of theoretical conceptions across different areas and methods of research.