Social scientists, in general, have argued vigorously for the autonomy of their field of study and have mostly looked askance at the attempts that have tended to show the social phenomena to be entirely determined by non - sociological factors. In their own turn, however they have been extremely antagonistic to the idea that there may be other phenomena which stand in the same relation to sociological phenomena as these do themselves to biological and physical phenomena. Sociologists, like most other scientists, seem to think that all that occurs in the field of human affairs is completely determined by factors which pertain to their own field of study. They are extremely averse to the admission of immanent causality within the field of supra- sociological phenomena.

There seems, however, no reason to believe that the emergence of autonomous realms with their immanent causality ceases at the sociological level. It would be as much a piece of blindness on the part of the sociologists to deny this as it would be in the case of those biologists or physicists who would deny autonomy and immanent causality to social phenomena. The mistake in the case of the latter is clearly visible to every sociologist, yet he immediately seems to develop a psychic scotoma when he himself commits it.

The supra-sociological phenomena are indeed dependent on sociological phenomena for their very existence, but this should in no way lead to the conclusion drawn by most sociologists that they are "determined" by them. If the logic of the argument were true in such a case, then we would inevitably be pushed further to the conclusion that the real determinants of any phenomenon are physical and not biological or sociological or supra-sociological in nature. The sociological phenomena, in fact, permit the existence of supra-sociological phenomena but do not determine them, in any way, in their specific nature. The large numbers of studies that have delineated the "determination" of cultural phenomena by sociological factors are vitiated, therefore, at their very core by this central fallacy.