Chapter 2: Philosophy of Science. Knowledge and Knowing Flashcards
What is involved in providing an explanation of social phenomena? How is explanation
distinct from and related to interpretation?
To explain social phenomena we should employ individualist and or holist ontologies and methodologies. These in turn help us explain how social phenomena produce social outcomes. Explanation = reasoning, interpretation = mimic
ontology + question
What is the nature of the social world? Is the social world fundamentally different from the social one?
epistemology
What is knowable? What sort of knowledge is possible? How can we know about it>? What form of knowledge can we treat as legitimate about the social world?
methodology
What strategies can we use to gain knowledge about the social world? What are the means and methods that can provide us with legitimate knowledge of the political world?
who is Auguste Comte?
creator of the term sociology, positivism daddy/ researchers can arrive to factual, reliable and objective answers to questions about the social world by using natural sciences methods
positivism
studying society through empirical scientific evidence - statistics and controlled experiments
positivism characteristics
credibility, factual/reliability, objectivity
3 tenets of positivism
naturalism, empiricism, laws
what is induction
an investigational method/ methodology of classical positivism which starts from specific observations and measurements, then identifies patterns and regularities then formulates a hypothesis.
induction formula/cycle
obs - pattern - tentative hypothesis - theory
What is deduction
A methodology used by logical positivism (alongside induction) starts from broad generalizations and then narrows in on specific statements
deduction formula
theory - hypothesis - observation - confirmation
black swan
Popper’s now famous story
of the black swan illustrates what happens when we attempt to formulate laws based on
observation. The story is that, once upon a time, Europeans thought all swans were white
because, having found nothing but white swans for thousands of years they concluded on
the basis of their experience that all swans were white. But one day Europeans went to New
Zealand (as Popper had), and there they found black swans. What this story tells us is that
no matter how many observations confirm a theory, it only takes one counter-observation
to falsify it: only one black swan is needed to repudiate the theory that all swans are white.
it only takes a single unforeseen or seemingly improbable event to invalidate a
generalization based on empirical observation, then empirical observation alone cannot
generate ‘laws’. Popper therefore concludes that, rather than endeavouring to discover laws
through induction, what scientists should be doing is testing theory deductively
Popper proposes that to establish truth claims we should in fact do the reverse of what logical
positivists propose: rather than continually attempting to verify or prove a theory, scientists
should attempt to disprove it.
hempel’ deductive nomological model aka DNM aka dinamita
A deductive-nomological explanation is deductive because we can logically deduce
the phenomenon we want to explain (explanandum) from that which does the explaining (the explanans); and it is nomological because the explanans includes at least one law
(‘nomos’ is the Greek word for law). According to this model, then, something is explained
when it is shown to be a member of a more general class of things, when it is deduced from
a general law or set of laws.
hempel’s hypothetico-deductive model
According to his hypotheticodeductive model of confirmation, we confirm that the generalization is a law (rather than
an accidental generalization) by treating it as a hypothesis, and then we test the hypothesis
by deducing from it a sufficient number of explicit predictions of further phenomena that
should be observable as a consequence of the hypothesis.
generalizations treat as hypothesis, test it by deducing consequences
verifiability
the goal of social scientific inquiry is to verify proposition
falsifiability
- theory must be formulated in a way that enables it to be disconfirmed
- when testing theories, we should seek to fasify not verify them
what is Margaret Archer’s contribution in 1995
An influential conception of how objective structure and individual, subjective agency interact over time is Margaret Archer’s (1995)
‘morphological model’ in which structural conditioning (which is treated as temporally
prior) conditions social interaction, which in turn generates structural elaboration
What are the ontology, epistemology and methodology of scientific realism?
naturalist ontology, empiricism + we know unobservable elements of social life because we can see their consequences, induction + deduction
individualism
ontology - basic units of society are individuals, social phenomena is the result of individual actors / methodology - social phenomena (class, power, nations) can be reduced to characteristics of individuals
holism
ontology - the whole of something is distinct from its individual parts, social facts are irreducible to facts abouts individuals / methodology - the properties of a system cannot be deduced by the properties of its components, the system itself determines how its parts behave
reification
treat macro-social entities independent of their constituent elements ( human agency)
Coleman’s Bathtub / boat
Causal relations between macro phenomena can be explained with micro foundations, macro lvl : doctrine/econ system etc (meth holism) -> micro lvl : behaviour of actors, economic actions (meth individ) ->macro outcome: capitalistic econ syst
naive realism
there is a reality that exists separate from our perception or observation of it
