SOCI 240 Study Guide - Immanuel Kant, Symbolic Interactionism, Heredity
Document Summary
Five ways of knowing: we accept authority, from culture, from personal experience, from carefully and rationally thinking through the ideas, carefully observation. Science and religion are two perspectives on the universe, and each has something important to say. To the social scientist, conscience, goodness, and evil are a result of society, something results from socialization. Kant"s words remind us science itself assume something about universe. It does not study everything, because it is limited. One of the very basic elements of science examined here is the assumption of natural cause, which leads social science to take a deterministic perspective to understand human behavior. As a perspective, it assumes that humans are part of nature, the phenomenal world. We are able to control what causes what we think and do. Sociology focuses on society, psychology on the person"s development resulting from heredity and environment, and social psychology on the social situations we encounter.
