Q.What are social facts? How do we recognise them?

Durkheim's concept of the social fact is his answer to a basic question every new discipline must face: what, exactly, does sociology study that no other discipline already studies? His answer was that sociology studies phenomena at what he called the 'emergent' level -- the level of complex collective life that comes into being only when individuals combine into a group, and that is genuinely different from, and more than, the sum of those individuals taken separately. A cricket team, a religious community or a nation is composed entirely of individual people, yet it becomes something else -- a social entity in its own right -- once those individuals come together; it is this emergent level, not the psychology of any single person, that sociology is meant to study. Durkheim defines a social fact more precisely through three connected features. First, it is external to the individual: it exists before any particular person is born and continues after they die, in the form of institutions like law, education or religion. Second, it is constraining: a social fact exerts a real pressure on individual behaviour, shaping what people do whether or not they are consciously aware of that pressure -- moral codes, legal rules and shared beliefs all limit the range of behaviour that is considered acceptable. Third, it is general rather than particular: a social fact is a collective representation shared across a group, not something invented or held by any one individual alone -- attitudes, feelings, beliefs and collective practices all qualify as long as they are of this general, shared character. How, then, do we actually recognise a social fact, given that abstract collective entities like 'the Bengali-speaking community' or 'the Jain community' cannot be seen directly the way a tree or a person can? Durkheim's answer was that although social facts are not directly observa …