SOC100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Inductive Reasoning, Deductive Reasoning, Post-Structuralism
14 Jun 2018
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CHAPTER 2 - APPLYING SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH METHODS
Overview:
- Why sociological research is important
- Common sense vs scientific knowledge
- Poststructuralism is a big problem, because it permeates academia
- What differentiates science? Eg astronomy vs astrology
- Scientific knowledge uses empirical methods
- Empiral is measurable; so it is using practical methods, controlled studies
and everything in order to give insight into what is going on and
causation
- Sociology is a “social science”
- So basically, common sense is the belief that most media (social) with people’s
beliefs and opinions are legitimate
- Science is legitimate because it uses empirical methods that thus makes it
legitimate
- Sociological reasoning
- Combines empirical methods with theory
- Concept - abstract idea
- Eg: social class
- Which is not always true, people can be both owners
AND workers
- So the lines and barriers are not as clear as they used to
be
- How do you know you have membership within this
social class? The definition is not always true, nor is it
always clear
- Class has two concepts
- There is the problematic one of putting people
INTO classes through memberships
- However you are always included in the class
struggle (this may always exist)
- Variable - categorical concept
- Eg: single is one of the categories in the variable “marital status”
- Deductive and Inductive reasoning
- Deductive reasoning is a theory
- You start off with some idea, which allows you to hypothesize.
And then after that, you go into inductive reasoning, which is
data gathering
- Inductive reasoning is a data gathering
- After data gathering, you find findings to support the theory you
made through deductive reasoning
- Deduction
- General to the specific
- If you were to drop something, the theory and the
deductive reasoning, is the fact that gravity exists
- It is a general theory, that proves what you see in
the world, specifically.
- The problem: the only way that you can prove deductive
reasoning, is that you have a preconception and idea in
mind which would then explain your theory
- You have to presume in your observation, what
is occurring
- So you are gathering SUPPORTING evidence
basically then. You HAVE to know what is
wrong in the first place
- You have no idea of WHAT TO LOOK AT, if you don’t
know WHAT TO LOOK F O R → the main critique
made by post-structuralism
- Eg: if someone were to tell you to go see how
many homeless people are there in __ street,
then you MUST have a preconceived idea of
WHAT a homeless person looks like, in order to
get information
- Probability becomes the way you do things through modern
science. It is a process of creating statistical probabilities to
determine causality
- Believing something is true, doesn’t make the cause
to be true.
- Post-structuralism is recognition of the problem that
believing something is true does not make it true. Which is
why there is a crisis, because we don’t know HOW to resolve
this problem. → cannot explain reality!
- Accepts a problem exists, but the crisis is how do we
accept this problem?
- We cannot live with it, because in order to live
with a problem then we would have to have a
resolve for it, but we don’t. Which is why it is a
huge ass crisis!
- You can either move past this problem,
or you can find ways to cope
- So BASICALLY, post-structuralism is rejecting the
metanarrative, so like stuff that is believed to be true and
should not be challenged, because the only reason we
“prove” this, is by getting supporting evidence to prove
that what WE think is true is right. And so, ultimately,
Document Summary
Poststructuralism is a big problem, because it permeates academia. Empiral is measurable; so it is using practical methods, controlled studies and everything in order to give insight into what is going on and causation. So basically, common sense is the belief that most media (social) with people"s beliefs and opinions are legitimate. Science is legitimate because it uses empirical methods that thus makes it legitimate. Which is not always true, people can be both owners. So the lines and barriers are not as clear as they used to be. The definition is not always true, nor is it always clear. There is the problematic one of putting people. However you are always included in the class struggle (this may always exist) Eg: single is one of the categories in the variable marital status . You start off with some idea, which allows you to hypothesize. And then after that, you go into inductive reasoning, which is data gathering.
