POLS 3180 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Falsifiability, Karl Popper, Empiricism
23 Sep 2016
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Document Summary
Is there are reality separate from what we experience through our senses. 3 main schools of thought: logical positivism, scientific realism. Main idea: science can study social reality relatively unproblematically and arrive at objective conclusions. Has underpinned social science for a very long time. Most other schools have emerged as a critique of logical positivism. Objectivism: there is a world independent of our interaction with it: things exist that we don"t know about. Naturalism: the social world is like the natural world. It is governed by recurrent patterns or laws". There is a fundamental distinction between facts (which are real and objective) and values (which are metaphysical and subjective: values should be left out of social science because they tell more about the researcher than the subject. Empiricism: observation (sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch) is the source of all knowledge.
