POLS 1000 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Dependent And Independent Variables, Political Anthropology, Classical Liberalism
3 Dec 2016
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Document Summary
Normative discourse needs critical and rational debate about human life: states of being to which humans should aspire. Our beliefs about the lives humans should lead, and about human nature carry implications for politics of societies we live in. Rules/laws are specifically human inventions that need language and culture life shared in communities. What is a good life depends on certain kinds of government politics. Replaced philosophical approach to politics because: dissatisfaction with philosophical approach to investigate properly the increasingly complex political world. Science conducts experiments in controlled environments which is never accurate given that outside the lab, it is difficult to have a controlled setting. Much of the work done in political science is observational and analytic. Law like generalization: reliable statement about relationship between two variables: whenever a happens, b will invariably follow. Dogmatic: incapable of being proven or disproven. Dependent variable: variable being measured for its response to researchers manipulation of an independent variable.
