SOCY 284 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Reductionism

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Social Sci, Edu and Soc Work - Sociology
• Course: SOCY 284
• Professor: Norma Mollers

Document Summary

Important to shaping and use of technology. Different people have different ways of making technologies. Technoscience as product of future: values and beliefs (the soft mushy stuff) matters. Technoscienti c cultures: distinct epistemic communities/communities of practice with distinct work styles. Ant perspective: engineering as rational association of human and nonhuman element to achieve. Sociology, too, can be understood in terms of culture. Agreements about what constitutes as a sociological problem. Set of techniques how to go about it. But also a fair mont of con ict among sociologist (intra-world and intra-segment) Positivism: engineers learn to take the social world at face value. Reductionism: engineers lean to reduce complexity rather than unfold it. Proponents: computers will be able to duplicate human expertise. Sceptics: impossible because of the nature of human knowledge.