INTL 3300 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Social Change, Ad Hominem, Infant Mortality
4 Feb 2016
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Usually avoid why : difficult to answer, often debatable, impossible to know for sure. Arguments: only as strong as the evidence that supports it. Ad hominem attack: attacking the person and not the argument. The pursuit of the why - looking for the cause in because. Political phenomena are almost never monocausal and require both necessary and sufficient (required and guaranteed) conditions to fully explain. A question that leads often generates a biased argument, cherry picked evidence. Empirical arguments link cause and effect through use of objective evidence. Normative arguments are built on social or individual values, how world should be: democracy is better, a particular religion is less prone to negative behavior, a particular economic policy is better. In the physical sciences, researchers work with things that can be easily quantified. Big questions we are usually taught: in the social sciences, we work with concepts.
