##Diagnosis and prediction in sociology
In their introductory chapter, the editors assess the problems of diagnosis in sociology. The authors first state that sociology is confronted with the expectation to deliver diagnoses of the state of society. This is what Comte claimed the task of sociology to be: "savoir pour prevoir". The first example is the breakdown of socialist societies. The authors then turn to examples of diagnoses of the Federal Republic of Germany and the different expectations addressed to sociology as a discipline from the public to supply society with statements about their condition and course of change. The next section is devoted to a systematic analysis of the methodological problems of diagnosis and prediction. Using the epistemological model of medical science, it is argued that a diagnosis is a classification based upon an already existing knowledge of patterns into which a given set of phenomena are subsumed. It is further argued that sociology lacks such stock of knowledge and, hence, diagnoses are not based upon theory but on conjectures given to meet societal demand for understanding society. In the final section, the authors argue that even weak predictions have a methodological potential if the context conditions are specified.##
Keywords: diagnosis and sociology, sociological diagnosis, prediction and sociology, analysis in sociology, conjecture and theory
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