Thinking Nature, Thinking Society: Conceptual Circulation and Ontological Transformation between Natural Sciences and Sociology

Abstract

Sociology has developed through a sustained and multidimensional relationship with the natural sciences since its emergence as an independent discipline. This relationship has generally been discussed in terms of positivism, methodological unity, and the extent to which natural sciences may serve as a model for the social sciences. This article argues that the interaction is deeper than methodological borrowing. Concepts circulating from physics, biology, mathematics, and systems sciences have also shaped how social reality is conceived at epistemological and ontological levels. The study examines the interdisciplinary circulation of concepts such as statics, dynamics, organism, evolution, structure, function, system, equilibrium, network, and complexity within the history of sociology and the philosophy of the social sciences. Its central argument is that these concepts are not transferred unchanged into sociology; rather, they are recontextualized in accordance with the distinctive characteristics of social reality and often enter sociological theory as conceptual clusters. While physics contributed vocabularies of law, order, and motion, biology foregrounded organism, differentiation, and function, and mathematics and systems sciences strengthened relational models based on feedback, networks, and complexity. Together, these conceptual trajectories have contributed to a gradual expansion from mechanical and substantialist images of society toward more relational, processual, and dynamic understandings. The article nevertheless emphasizes that conceptual permeability must not become ontological reductionism and that the meaning-producing, historical, and reflexive character of social reality must remain analytically central.