SOCY 210 Lecture Notes - Research, Situational Ethics, Auguste Comte

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Social Sci, Edu and Soc Work - Sociology
• Course: SOCY 210
• Professor: Vincent F Sacco

Document Summary

We know because we have gone into the empirical world, and done research and discovered things. Our attention is limited to empirical questions. A question that has an answer that presumably qualified observers would agree. What is reality (agreement, experiential), this is complicated question. This simple claim raises a number of very complicated philosophical questions with no single answer. We are interested in assertions about reality, which have both logical and empirical support. Our brains fool us, and mess with us. Sometime the line of empirical reality is blurry. We can contrast the ways of knowing emphasizes in this course (version of the scientific method) with more familiar ways of knowing. Acquired from culture, social institutions, common knowledge. Found in religious tracts, oral traditions, aphorisms. The problem with much traditional knowledge is easy to illustrate. Comes from those who hold some status and supposedly by implication expertise. Refers to what everybody know and what is self-validating.