 Dear students, in this module, we are going to talk about the origin of sociology. And by origin of sociology, we mean to say that what was the difference between the traditional thinking versus the scientific thinking. The scientific thinking that began at the beginning of 17th century through the process of enlightenment in the West. And by enlightenment, we mean to say that in the 17th century, there was such a revolution in Europe in which people's way of thinking, or thinking process, started to change and the typical traditional thinking process started to convert into scientific thinking. This means that people had drawn their basic assumptions from traditional sources, for example, from religion, or from their traditions, or from their beliefs, on which they were running their lives. So gradually, they changed all the processes and started making their thinking more and more scientific. How did they start making it? Because it was a part of a scientific revolutionary process in which there were some innovations and inventions that guided a person in such a way in which he felt that the way we think, our way of thinking, should be different, should be more systematic, should be more scientific, which can be more useful for us. So, scientific revolution in the 17th century was a catalytic event that paved the way to the new approach to understand this word. And scientific method typically emphasized the empirical evidence and systematic observation. Now, what does systematic observation mean? There is one thing that we observe in our own way. We observe a lot of things and make some assumptions about what we do and based on that, we try to collect our own pile or stock of knowledge. What is the unscientific method? What happens in the scientific method is that there is a systematic way of observation in which we draw some hypotheses, we have some assumptions and we test them in the field. Through a rigorous process, there is a rigorous sampling process through which we draw some generalizations on the basis of a limited number of observations but we consider it to be a more credible source of knowledge. So, this approach challenged the traditional belief and authority. So, what happened was that the traditional belief system, especially the one that was our religious belief in Europe, which was drawn from Christianity, they started to see it from the perspective of suspicion and suspicion. And slowly, as you know, in Europe, there was a religious and scientific approach and then it led to the development of new fields of study, including sociology. So, as the natural sciences were changing, we had to deal with people, their religions, and how to deal with each other. All these things gradually started to affect that. For example, if we understand our natural environment in a scientific way, then we can achieve beneficial or useful results. So, why not social processes? Why not people around us? So, we started to see human religions gradually changing and new fields started to emerge at that time. The foundation of the 17th century onwards and the voice of sociology was created through the same process in which we started to see how we can understand people, their religions in a scientific way. So, sociology emerged as a response to the social changes and challenges of the modern era. Traditional societies had different challenges, different problems, different issues. They used to be dealt with in a special way. But as the new revolutions, new inventions, new innovations came, new challenges started to emerge in the human world. So, sociology is actually the name of this modern era with a special point of view. So, it sought to apply the scientific method to the study of social phenomena. So, social phenomena is our tradition, our way of dealing with each other, our way of interacting with each other. How can we scientifically understand them? And typically, sociology aimed to provide a rational and systematic understanding of society and human behavior. So, in other words, the scientific method was very focused on and because of that focus, we call sociology a scientific study or a social science study. Now, this is a little contestable issue whether sociology can be called a science or not. But in its foundation, scientific method is present, scientific process is a scientific thinking process. And it challenged the traditional ways of thinking from the new insights into the social world. So, even today, when we look at sociology or any social sciences, their particular focus is on the things in our tradition, which are part of our beliefs, system or faith, or through our opinionated processes, they are part of the stock of knowledge. They are challenged to scientifically establish the credibility of their knowledge.