POLS 2503 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Auguste Comte, David Hume, Logicism
26 Sep 2017
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Document Summary
Positivism existence of an objective reality that humans can experience and the best/only way to gain knowledge of that reality is through observation and experience; discovering regular and identifiable patterns in reality. Epistemology the study of how we know what we know. Ontology the study of discovering what reality is. Naturalism a belief in regularities, a methodological position reliant on an empiricist epistemology which grounds our knowledge of the world in justification by experience and thereby licensing methodology and ontology insofar as they are empirically warranted. Science vs. phenomenology experience defines truth (faulty perspective: explanation vs. Notes from positivism and beyond by steve smith. Problems: disregard for outliers, truth is subjective. Critiques and limitations of positivism: phenomenalist critique: positivism is limited to studying observations, causation vs. Correlation: limited to describing correlations because causation cannot be observed: human observer bias: true, unmediated observation is impossible; experience is interpreted based on preexisting knowledge which relies on social constructs.
