Week 1 - Knowledge

Question 1

explain what knowledge is and how it is obtained

Answer 1

Intuition-thinking and feeling without evidence
Rationalism-forms hypothesis
Authority-respected sources used to inform research
Empiricism-from experience and observation

Question 2

describe the current conception of science and describe its history

Answer 2

Science is a synthesis of traditional methods, inductive (if 1 can ALL can) and deductive (if all can, these ones here can) reasoning, falsification (attempt to disprove hypothesis) and naturalism (seek empirical adequacy)

Question 3

understand the basic assumptions underlying scientific research

Answer 3

Uniformity-must be relationship between events in nature
Reality-the things we experience in nature are real
Discoverability-we can discover the uniformity and reality in nature

Question 4

describe the characteristics of scientific research and understand why each of these is necessary

Answer 4

Control- control variables so we only vary one thing at a time
Operationalism-specific and consistent variable definition
Replication- to trust results.

If these 3 not included > pseudoscience