SOCB05H3 Chapter Notes -Social Theory, Scientific Theory
Document Summary
Most of what you know is a matter of agreement and belief. Little is based on personal experience and discovery. Science offers an approach to both agreement reality and experiential reality. In general, a scientific assertion must have both logical and empirical support: it must make sense and not contradict actual observation. Epistemology is the science of knowing; methodology (a subfield of epistemology) might be called the science of finding out. Humans seem predisposed to predict their future circumstances using causal and probabilistic reasoning. We generally recognize that future circumstances are caused or conditioned by present ones and that such patterns of cause and effect are probabilistic in nature. In that, the effects occur more often when the causes occur than when they don t but not always. Once we can understand why things are related to one another and why certain patterns occur, we can predict better than through simply observing and figuring out.
