Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Wall

Wall is putting his finger on a professional reflex that quietly shapes what counts as “serious” knowledge. The line isn’t merely definitional; it’s an indictment of training as boundary-making. By saying academic sociologists “have been trained” to conceive sociology as “the scientific study of society,” he frames the discipline less as a natural intellectual project and more as an institutional habit: a learned posture designed to look rigorous, coherent, and defensible inside the academy.

The key verb is “remit.” It’s bureaucratic, almost clerical, suggesting that the division between sociology and psychology functions like paperwork: individuals get filed under “psych,” society under “soc.” That word choice carries subtext about turf wars and the politics of expertise. In practice, sociologists can’t avoid individuals (who else “does” society?), and psychologists can’t avoid social forces (who else “makes” the individual?). Wall’s sentence works because it exposes how disciplines protect their identity by outsourcing complications.

Contextually, this lands in a long 20th-century argument about the micro/macro split: whether sociology should pursue big, structural explanations that resemble the natural sciences, or whether it must grapple with lived experience, motivation, and meaning. Wall’s intent seems to be to pry open that sealed border. The “scientific study” phrasing is doing double duty: it signals sociology’s aspiration to objectivity while hinting at the anxiety beneath it - the fear that attending to individuals risks sounding “soft,” narrative, or insufficiently scientific.

What makes the quote sharp is its quiet accusation: the partition isn’t truth, it’s training.