Importance Of Classification In Sociology

Disciplinary Comparison

There are a lot of ways to study classification. Psychologists consider classification as an innate ability, and Biologists classify animals by shapes and patterns. Then why Sociology bothers to deal with the issue? Why do Durkheim and Foucault choose to study the topic to represent the significance of Sociology? To Durkheim, he insists the uniqueness of Sociology. Sociology not only can analyze social facts from the perspective of social, but also can study them scientifically in a social science way. On the topic of classification, he said, only Sociology can trace and explain the origin of the logic of classification, since classification is itself a social institution which is socially constructed (dp2). It is not

Although Psychologists attempt to take classification as a result of the distinction of the bonds and affinities between the strongly or weakly linked objects and concepts which seems like considering the relationship between things, they regard it as an outcome of an exercise of individual minds. The mistake of taking classification as a product of the individual is the result of the decline of the social affects which was once putting much pressure on the members of the society. Men built classification system socially, and the system asks men to obey it. However, because the analysis of social affects is too complicated, there is a trend of abdicating the origin of classification to individuals in the scientific analysis of classification. And, the social affects component of classification fades gradually as time goes by (dp94). Durkheim does not claim that analyzing social facts cannot be a kind of psychological task, what he presses is that it should not be an individual psychological analysis, but a social psychological one (ds377). In other words, Sociology takes social affects and social construction into account when studying classification, and this is the reason that distinguishes

He shows this inclination in his work on the change of viewpoints on madness. In the classical period, madness was considered one kind of unreason. There was no distinction between physical therapy and psychological medications. Madness was treated as unreason in the classical period and transformed the qualities and restituted the truth belief of the patients were the primary treatment. Nonetheless, in the last half of eighteenth century, doctors constructed madness as a moral concept, which disassociated it from unreason, and constraint it into a pathology. Madness after the change became no longer the unreasonable truth, but a phenomenon that was only on the surface of the body. Psychology was born at this time as a sign to signify that other than the physical illness of the patients, the unreason part of madness was moral illness and not unreason truth anymore (fm180-190). Psychology in Foucault’s view, is only a sign that analyze the surface of madness and a sign that falsify the truth into ostensible moral