POLS 3180 Lecture 2: Why Research Methods

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Political Science
• Course: POLS 3180
• Professor: Edward Koning

Document Summary

Human inquiry: making sense of the world around us. In this course we will assume that it is both possible and worthwhile to acquire knowledge about the world around us. Prediction understanding: we want to be right about what happens and have a plausible explanation why it happens. In our everyday life, we rely on two sources of knowledge": agreement: we believe it is true because people around us say it is true, experience: we believe it is true based on our own observations. Agreement as a source of knowledge typically relies on: tradition, authority. These sources are not foolproof: logically, they cannot be taken as evidence, historically, many claims held true by tradition and authorities turned out to be false. Major dangers as well in non-scientific reliance on experience: 1. Inaccurate and selective observation: personal bias, cognitive limitations, 2.