SOCY 227 Lecture Notes - Collective Consciousness, Fatalism, Altruistic Suicide

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Social Sci, Edu and Soc Work - Sociology
• Course: SOCY 227
• Professor: G R Frank Pearce

Document Summary

Is a system of more or less explicitly specified linguistic and other signs organised in a distinct discourse. The discourse demarcates, describes, analyses, imagines and explains the social realm and specifies its relation to the broader cosmos. Its accounts exceed what can be observed captures something about something but does not necessarily represent it. Analytically identifiable aspects of social theories: concecptual sytem, ontology, normativity, (refer to slides) The heart of a asocial theory is the conceptual system. Conceptual theories are typically examined for their degree of coherence. There is a significant distance between a theory and the empirical world. This may pose problems in relating one to the other. Ontology is about what beings exist in the universe including the enquirer what makes up the enquirer as well as what makes up what the enquirer is studying. As a human being you experience and understand things in a certain way.