POLS 110 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Political Geography, Ethnography, Thomas Kuhn
10 Jul 2016
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Document Summary
Logical positivism- strictest version of positivism, never including normative judgments. Challenges to a positivist, semantic and empiricist approach. Limitations to what can be studied like things that can be observed or measured. Difficult to sustain the semantic approach that treated the concepts as having a defined meaning. Neutrality may be impossible to gather data that doesn"t involve normative judgments. Problem of the observer effect- the study itself has an effect on the people being studied. Outcome of research may end up being predetermined by the method used. The research relationship is itself a political relationship can be a power relationship. Growing recognition that science is not neutral. Thomas kuhn science doesn"t develop gradually is takes place within existing frameworks of knowledge which undergo huge shifts, impact was that it suggested that science was not a pure thing, it could be challenged. Increased recognition of the effect of the scientist and of observation on the object of analysis.
