SOC101Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Nomothetic, The Foundations, Dependent And Independent Variables
Document Summary
Ordinary human inquiry: practically all people, and many other animals as well, exhibit a desire to predict their future circumstances. Humans seem predisposed to undertake this talk using causal and probabilistic reasoning: we generally recognize that future circumstances are somehow cause or conditioned by present ones. We also learn that such patterns of cause and effect are probabilistic in nature. Tradition: each of us inherits a culture made up, in part, of firmly accepted knowledge about the workings of the world, tradition, in this sense of the term, offers some clear advantages to human inquiry. If we seek fresh understanding of something everybody already understand and has always understood, we may be marked as fools for our efforts. More to the point, however, it rarely occurs to most of us to seek a different understanding of something we all know to be true. Authority: despite the power of traditional knowledge appears every day.
