POLS 3180 Lecture 2: Why Methods?
16 Sep 2016
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Inquiry: attempts to understand and predict the world around us. Instrumental value: learn things you can then use, can be superstitious or even wrong. You may not understand the mechanisms behind it even if you can predict it. Ex. you can know where the sun rises but may not necessarily know why. Not everything is logically related just because they go together well/ match up statistically. We want to be right about what happens and have a plausible explanation why it happens. Two sources of knowledge" in everyday life: 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 based on: tradition, authority. These sources are not foolproof or safe approaches for research. Major dangers as well in non-scientific reliance on experience. Our brain is not perfect (cognitive limitations) so our memories do not always recollect everything perfectly.
