POLSCI 3N06 Lecture Notes - Social Fact, Social Reality, Nomothetic
23 Nov 2013
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Document Summary
How can we know that world and access knowledge: Positivism is based upon a number of premises, there is an objective world out there that exists outside of our consciousness; that is stable and predictable; we can know this world through logic. Natural versus social world; analogous; certain regularity in the natural world; universally true things about the natural world; certain pattern regularities, certain causes that have certain effects. Positivism only works if you can separate facts from values; unless you can identify facts (the things that actually are), unless you can do that our goal of constructing can"t be done. Social world and natural world analogous is there anything about the social world somehow demarcates what it is and how we know it: Something that cannot be explained by causal law; Is the social world analogous to the natural world: the scientist as a human being. For critics of the positivist approach, observation is mediated through experience, language, culture.
