Answer:
It’s interesting how many people think that sociology is just commonsense.
It’s a perfectly fair assumption. After all, we cannot understand the
workings of things like atoms, molecules or cells simply from our everyday
experiences. They are not directly accessible to us. We can only know
about them from expert knowledge. Therefore, it is easy to justify the need
for specialist subjects like physics, chemistry and biology.
But we can’t say the same about the social world. Much of it is directly
accessible to us and we begin learning about it from the moment we are
born. In a way, we are all sociologists of a kind because, by the time we
are grown up, most of us have developed a number of social skills and an
extensive knowledge of the social world around us. We don’t just learn
about social life from our own experiences, we are also bombarded with
information about our own and other societies from newspapers, radio
and television and the internet. People also have theories and opinions
about their society, what’s wrong with it, what’s causing these problems
and what could, and should, be done to make things better. Sociologists call this
‘lay’, or commonsense, knowledge of society.
