Do you think we are all sociolgists to a certain degree why/why not

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.