Sociology and science
- Created by: 11pyoung
- Created on: 16-05-18 16:56
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- Sociology and science
- What is a science?
- The positivist approach
- There are objective social facts about the social world
- Not influenced by the researcher's personal opinion
- Positivism and sociology
- Durkheim's view is still influential as it gives simple answers to the question: whether sociology can or should be studied as a science
- There are objective social facts about the social world
- Karl Popper
- Agrees with Durkheim that sociology can be scientific and that it is a good thing for it to be considered as a scientific subject
- Rejects an induction approach
- Whatever you are studying will have to be informed by some sort of initial theory
- The positivist approach
- Questioning sociology as scientific: interpretivist sociology
- Sociological criticisms of sociology as a science
- Differences between the nature of society and the physical world
- Sociology is not comparable to the natural world and to attempt to transfer the methods and ideas of the natural sciences is a mistake
- Less about methods and more about the reality of the world around us
- Lyotard
- The external world can only be known, understood, and categorised through language
- Sociology is not comparable to the natural world and to attempt to transfer the methods and ideas of the natural sciences is a mistake
- Problems of prediction
- The natural and social worlds consist of different types of phenomenon
- Differences between the nature of society and the physical world
- Sociological criticisms of sociology as a science
- Modernity, postmodernity and science
- Rorty
- Rationality, truth and science are all bound together, and all other ways of knowing the world are inferior
- Lyotard
- The nature of language limits and channels science, because it provides a framework to approach an understanding the world
- Is science objective?
- Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar
- Scientific knowledge is produced through social processes that sociologists can research, analyse and try to understand
- Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar
- Rorty
- Thomas Kuhn
- Science was usually seen as progressing through the use of the hypothetico-deductive model
- There is no reason to believe that the current paradigms will be accepted forever and therefore, be taken to be true
- Evaluation
- Lakatos
- Kuhn's idea of paradigms is too simplistic and only applies to the past
- Lakatos
- Realist views of sociology and open and closed systems
- Andrew Sayer
- The models of the physical sciences based on positivism and/or pooper are misleading
- The models fail to distinguish between the open and closed systems in which scientists operate
- The models of the physical sciences based on positivism and/or pooper are misleading
- Realism and sociology
- Restores the possibility that sociology can be seen as scietific
- Andrew Sayer
- What is a science?
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