SOCIOL 2Z03 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Longitudinal Study, Abraham Kaplan, Harold Garfinkel
6 Mar 2017
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Agreement reality : what we know as part and parcel of the culture we share with those around us. Experiential reality: what we know from personal experience and discovery. Practically all people exhibit a desire to predict their future circumstances by using casual and probabilistic reasoning. Future circumstances are somehow causes or conditioned by present ones. Such patterns of cause and effect are probabilistic in nature, the effects occur more often when the causes occur than when cases are absent. Science makes these concepts of causality and probability more explicit and provides techniques for dealing with them more rigorously than does casual human inquiry. In looking at ordinary human inquiry, we need to distinguish between prediction and understanding. If you can understand why things are related to one another, why certain regular patterns occur, you can predict better than if you simply observe and remember those patterns.
