POLS 3180 Lecture Notes - Logical Positivism, Antipositivism, Social Reality
1 Dec 2013
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Pols 3180 research methods i september 18 2013 (lecture iii) What is it good at? (class disagreed on answers to these questions) What kind of things exist in the world, what is true. Philosophers of science focused on whether there is such a thing as objective truth. Your ontology provides for your epistemology and intertwined with your methodology. It is governed by recurrent patterns or laws . ** there is a world out there we take a look and have general knowledge. The rationalist critique: main point: observation alone doesn"t prove much. It is meaningless since it is not guided by theory and logic. Observation is meaningless if not guided by theory and logic. How do you determine what to study: karl popper (1902- 1994) When he went to australia he saw that swans are black: implication of induction: [start with general expectations ( rule) and then look at individual cases]
