SOCB42H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Starbucks, Ice Storm, Alexis De Tocqueville
Document Summary
Sociology and the hierarchy of sciences, simple to complex. Comte says that first of all we see historically we see this development of the sciences, each building on the one before. We can"t have chemistry without physics or astronomy and so on and so forth. But he not only sees a historical progression in the discipline of sciences but he thinks that we"re also moving from simplicity to complexity. He says sociology or social science is the most complicated of the sciences. He thinks sociology is kind of similar except that we"re dealing with fixed laws or human behavior. Comte thinks that we have fixed laws that guide what we can and cannot do in our social world and laws about cause and effect in a context. So if we know the context, we can predict what"s going to happen.
