SOC 202 Study Guide - Comprehensive Final Exam Guide - Sociology, Verstehen, Social Fact
20 Nov 2018
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To answer the question if sociology is a science or not, first we need to know what is a science, otherwise the question does not make much sense. Actually current philosophical views on the nature of science are diverse, and largely liberalized from previous views. First, they no longer accept strong criteria of falsification as a scientific method. There are several ways to formulate falsification, but here i mean something like this: Scientific theories should make observable predictions and we should discard a theory if we find only one discrepancy between a prediction of the theory and an observation. Because even physics cannot meet such a strong criteria, now philosophers like lakatos (1970) admit tolerance to such failure to some extent. Another new movement in philosophy is the attack on the universal laws. Cartwright (1983) argued that seemingly universal physical laws are not really universal, from logical point of view.
