SOCI 300 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Social Fact, Social Change
14 Jan 2017
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They are distinct from other facts in nature. Marx: knowledge emerges from the economy, social thinkers need to be activists. Weber: our role as sociologists is to study society as objectively as possible. There is supposed to be a strict separation between social facts and norms: sociologists should not enforce norms as facts, the social facts that we study as sociologists can impact our morality. A social fact is objective because it doesn"t rely on individual consciousness or control. Collective practices, myths, routines are social facts. Durkheim wants to develop an objective science of society in which we can say that there is truth about society. Social facts exist within us and in society. There are 3 ways to describe social facts: external and independent. Exists in methods of ways of acting, thinking and feeling. They are external to us because they existed prior to us gaining knowledge of them.
