POLS 2200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Thomas Hobbes, Martha Finnemore, John Locke
22 Dec 2016
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Furthermore this social reality is not objective, our reality is subjective. The study of ir must focus on the ideas and beliefs that inform the actors on the international scene as well as on the shared understandings between them. Ontology: refers to how we view the world, how we see or understand the essence of things around us. Epistemology is how we come to know something (or at least what we think we know) about the world. It flows out of ontology; an epistemology relates to a specific ontology. Positivism: most of the realists and liberals we have studied so far in class are positivists. Positivists believe that the world is out there", that it is separate from the viewer (ontology). This means we can study society as we would study the natural world. We can see it, observe it, measure it objectively as we would conduct a scientific experiment (epistemology).
