and so the social world typically involves many competing versions or interpretations of reality. For example, a shopkeeper and a customer may have very different ideas about what is a ‘good’ price, a young person and an aged person may have very different notions of ‘good food’, and so on. There is no simple way of judging which particular interpretation is true or more correct, and often it is unhelpful to think in these terms. In fact, sociology tries not to judge in this way because it is really interested in what people think, and why they think what they think.
A further complication arises from the presence of multiple points of view in the social sciences themselves. Like its sister social sciences, sociology too is a ‘multi-paradigmatic’ science. This Activity Can you observe yourself as you observe others? Write a short description of yourself as seen from the perspective of : (i) your best friend; (ii) your rival; (iii) your teacher.
You must imagine yourself to be these people and think about yourself from their point of view. Remember to describe yourself in the third person — as ‘he’ or ‘she’ rather than ‘I’ or ‘me’. Afterwards, you can share similar descriptions written by your classmates. Discuss each others’ descriptions — how accurate or interesting do you find them?
Are there any surprising things in these descriptions? means that competing and mutually incompatible schools of thought coexist within the discipline (Recall the discussion in Chapter about conflicting theories of society). All this makes objectivity a very difficult and complicated thing in sociology. In fact, the old notion of objectivity is widely considered to be an outdated perspective.
Social scientists no longer believe that the traditional notion of an ‘objective, disinterested’ social science is attainable; in fact such an ideal can actually be misleading. This does not mean that there is no useful knowledge to be obtained via sociology, or that objectivity is a useless concept. It means that objectivity has to be thought of as the goal of a continuous, ongoing process rather than an already