Howard S. Becker: What about Mozart? What about murder?
The sociologies of science, art, and deviance have a ommon problem. All three challenge conventional thinking about the objects they study. The sociology of art makes problematic the status of objects as “real art,“ the sociology of deviance challenges conventional definitions
of right and wrong, and the sociology of science questions the unthinking acceptance of the results of scientific work. In all three fields, empirical sociological research is supplanting philosophical reasoning. Good sociological work requires us to avoid accepting conventional definitions of the phenomena we study.
