Ponder: Why not believe in global warming? Why not think vaccinations cause autism? Why collect traffic stop data?
Reading: What is obvious? by Paul Lazarsfeld.
- The Craft of Research
- Methods Belong to Everyone
- Epistemology: Ways of Knowing
- Rationalism, Empiricism, and Kant
- The Norms of Science
- The Development of Science — Democritus to Newton
- Exploration, Printing, and Modern Science
- Science, Money, and War
- The Development of Social Science: From Newton to Rousseau
- Early Positivism: Quételet, Saint-Simon, Comte
- Technology and Science
- Social Science Failures
- The Varieties of Positivism
- Later Positivism: The Vienna Circle
- Instrumental Positivism
- The Reaction against Positivism
- About Numbers and Words: The Quantitative/Qualitative Split
- Ethics and Social Science
Examples and Illustrations
Links
Emic/Etic Distinctions by James Lett
Least You Should Know
- A definition of "science" … objective, logical, and systematic method of analysis of phenomena devised to permit accumulation of reliable knowledge
- Name and explain the three "norms of science" … objective, method, reliable
- The embeddedness of "methods" in epistemology
- The difference between deduction and induction
- The meaning of "empirical" and "positivism"
- Be able to say something about humanism, hermeneutics, and phenomenology
Food for Thought
Themes introduced here (e.g., rationalism vs. empiricism) are echoed over and over in the study of human beings:
Science/Epistemology
Individual
Ethics
Social Theory
rationalism
essence/nature
universal
idealism (Hegel)
empiricism
learning/nurture
relativism
materialism (Marx)
Concepts, terms, vocabulary
Comte (12-3)
Condorcet (11)
constructivism (3.2)
deduction (9)
dualism (9)
empiricism (3)
epistemology (3.4)
experiment (8)
hermeneutics (21-2)
humanism (3, 20)
hypothetico-deductive model
of science (9)
induction (9)
interpretavism
metaphysics (5-6)
phenomenology (22-3)
positivism (3)
Quételet (12)
rationalism (3-4)
reliable (6)
Rousseau (12)
social contract (12)
tabula rasa (4)
Vienna Circle (18)
Voltaire (11)