Lecture 1

Question 1

What are the characteristics of natural sciences?

Answer 1

• “Example science” = easy to show how it works
• Most ancient; astronomy since 1200 BCE
• Developed after scientific revolution (1550-1700)
• Universals and regularities; classes of outcomes and not individual outcomes
• Standard techniques of theorising: mathematisation, abstraction, idaelisation
• Can produce formats: laws of nature
• Laws as paradigms of knowledge; highest grade of scientific knowledge

Question 2

What are characteristics of Humanities?

Answer 2

• Ways of doing (rather than ways of knowing) - grammar, rhetoric, logic
• Focus on historical human actors
• Historical particularity: every context is unique
• Mistrust generalisation and idealisation
• Main output = interpretation (of acts, texts and artworks), embedded in theoretical frameworks
• Objectivity of interpretation (testing against other texts or material)

Question 3

What are characteristics of Social Sciences?

Answer 3

• Youngest group of disciplines
• Originated in 19th century in French and German debates on how to study societies
• Examples: sociology, political science, economics, psychology, etc.
• World of social sciences contains human agents and institutions, forms of behaviour, rationality and ritual, cultures
• Attraction to both natural sciences and humanities
• Diversity within disciplines: both quantitative and qualitative approaches

Question 4

How can we conceptualise the difference between natural sciences and humanities?

Answer 4

Through the concept of using nomothetic and idiographic approaches

Question 5

What are characteristics of the nomothetic approach?

Answer 5

• Identifying regularities in the world
• Explain outcomes as following from rules and patterns
• formulating generalisations and laws to describe regularities
• deriving explanations of observed outcomes from these generalisations
• typical of natural sciences
• Looking at the world and defying regularities in it; then formulate roles of nature to try and explain the regularity

Question 6

What are strengths of the nomothetic approach?

Answer 6

• Identify similarities and structures that underlie apparently diverse cases
• Yield sweeping, general knowledge
• Yield economical knowledge

Question 7

What are weaknesses of the nomothetic approach?

Answer 7

• Not good at identifying the specificity of outcomes

- Can be reductive, mechanistic, positivistic

Question 8

What are characteristics of the idiographic approach?

Answer 8

• Specify
• Understanding the meaning of contingent, unique and often subjective outcomes
• Typical of humanities

Question 9

What are the strengths of the idiographic approach?

Answer 9

• Reveal differences between apparently similar cases

- Can yield detailed, context-sensitive knowledge

Question 10

What are the weaknesses of the idiographic approach?

Answer 10

Can be blind to general factors that constrain outcomes