SOAN 2111 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Verstehen
20 Sep 2016
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Document Summary
Lecture 4: critical evaluation of positivism, critical theorists. Prefer to focus on human activity: habarmas. It is inherently conservative incapable of challenging the existing system: critics. Implied forgetting about real human beings: defense of empiricism, some feminists were also empiricists, we need to return to the social sciences to search for explanations. For causes and effects in a real social world. Mcdonald: results of empirical research can be profoundly critical of the existing social arrangements, social sciences cannot be value-free. Values will always shape the choice of what is studied and how: empiricism and equality rights, research provides examples of actual empirical work. Hypothesis development, data collection and interpretation: interpretive theory, the study of society that focuses on the meaning people attach to their social world, value orientation and social context, use of symbols, major presuppositions of interpretive theory. Sociological variables are defined by means of human language. Human action becomes meaningful in terms of social rules.
