Scoiology And Science Flashcards
Something us scientific when it uses?
- Empiricism
- Objectivity
What is empiricism?
Knowledge gained from actually experiencing and/or observing something
What is objectivity?
Where the research does not involve opinions, or bias or prejudice
Auguste Comte - sociology IS a science
- It’s possible to discover the laws that control and shape the behaviour of people in society
- Science isn’t there to tell us why something came into being
- Science is there to explain how things relate to each other, using laws. Som Asian lads and the police dont relate well because of social fact called racism
- The main task of sociology is to dos outer general laws of social development:
i) laws of co existence - looking at the relationship between parts of society
Ii) laws of succession - what are the laws that govern social change?
What is inductive logic?
Inductive logic is a big part of positivism.
- it is a type of reasoning about something that involves moving from a set of specific facts to a general conclusion.
- it uses premises from objects that have been examined and experiments that have been conducted to establish a conclusion about an object that has not been examined.
Durkheim - sociology IS a science
- Durkheim thought Comte had failed to establish sociology as a science
- he thought instead, that sociology should study social facts as things to observe and measure. So, things like the suicide rate.
Karl popper - sociology is NOT a science
- thought that all academic subject areas that wanted to be called a ‘science’ should subject themselves to a process of falsification
- to test itself, therefore, sociology must come up with testable hypothesis.
- Karl popper rejected Marxism as pseudo science, because its concepts, such as false class consciousness, were too abstract to be even and measured.
The deductive method
- this starts with a theory
- then the theory is bombarded with challenges to its hypothesis in order to see if it stands up to its claims
The inductive method
- this starts with a theory
- then the theory finds loads of evidence to prove itself to be right
Interpretivism
- is the alternative, the total opposite of positivism
- people like Webber say sociology should study society from the perspective of other people to understand how and why things happen
- using Webber’s perspective of verstehen requires subjective understanding which draws on peoples opionons
- sociology is strongly objective and dose not allow option to influence research
- for this reason, interpretivists argue sociology cannot ever be a science
Thomas Kuhn
- is sitting on the fence (yes and no)
- he looked at the hostile of the natural sciences and argued that its not simply an accumulation of knowledge that ends up being the credible academic body we know as science, but that it went through a series of paradigm shifts or revolutions.
Paradigm shifts
Pre science: period of discovery where there was no central paradigm
Normal science: where scientists used an established paradigm, like the theory of evolution, to support theories
Revolutionary science: where he paradigms are challenged
- e.g when people thought the world was fair
Thomas Kuhn - paradigm shifts
- this idea is essentially correct and important
- every scientific truth that has ever existed has always been disproven
- as crazy as it sounds, everything we know now might all be completely wrong. In other words, science isn’t actually objective at all
Thomas Kuhn - theory of sociology
- sociology behaves like its in the pre science stage: there’s no dominant perspective and there are lots of competing theories and perspectives its totally valid to refer to sociology as a young science that still needs to fund its unifying theory
The positivist approach
- durkhiems approach, as illustrated by his study of suicide (1897), is the most influential and be used to illustrate a positivist view of science
