SOC200H1 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Inductive Reasoning, Data Analysis, Nomothetic
Document Summary
Summary of chapter one: human inquiry and science. People know what they know primarily through two processes. First, people know things through agreement, the things they consider to be real because they have been told they are real. Believing what we are told yields most of what we know. Second, people know things through direct experience, primarily through observation. People have long struggled with determining what is real. Science provides a way of looking at both agreement reality and experiential reality. The scientific approach to both realities demands that two criteria be met: an assertion must have both logical and empirical support. Hence, science is a special form of human inquiry, the result of the human desire to predict future events and to understand patterns of cause and effect. Babbie and benaquisto examine social science methodology, which could simply be called the science of finding out. Methodology is a subfield of epistemology, the science of knowing.
