Complete overview and notes of the Sociological Theory course for year 2 sociology. It contains all the important information about the lectures (videos) and presentations (including images), and the notes are a good overview of the entire course! I used the notes as the basis of the subject matter...
Golden standard or science: experimental method
● study associations
● to underscribe findings, you need to underscribe naturalist assumptions
Core assumptions of naturalism
● realism
- there is a real world that exists independent of our experience
● empiricism
- we can get excess to the real world by observing and thinking about it
(reflecting) and recording our experiences
● reality is patterned and structured
- the real, observable world has patterned, is structured and has regularities
- the observed patterns imply causality
- to make causal claims, a combination of hypotheses testing, experimental or
observational methods are necessary
Method of choice → experiments
● separation between facts and values
- facts are not good or bad, you can only make statements about facts that are
true or false
- facts are not an opinion, but exists in the real world independently of our
moral evaluations
● general statements (instead of ideographic statements)
- general statements that can precisely describe and predict behaviour of
individual cases
Four challenges of naturalism
● Are social phenomena ontologically similar to natural phenomena?
- ‘’If people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences’’
● Is the structure or reality patterned?
- Is there a ‘clockwork’ universe? → in that case, social world and phenomena
can be accurately predicted
● Can we directly perceive reality through our senses?
- No Tabula Rasa → biologically determined qualities that affect how we
understand the world
- Can we make sense of our experiences without prior knowledge?
- Isn’t our understanding of the world moulded by prior (social) experiences?
- Is it possible to distinguish between observation and interpretation?
● How do we address the concept of ‘’meaning’’?
- People are meaning makers
- Things/gestures/symbols can mean different things in different contexts
, Video 2 - Week 1
Constructivism
Main questions
- What is the nature of the object of study?
- What is the relation between the researcher and the object of study?
Constructivism
● General assumption is that reason or the mind plays an active role in the creation of
knowledge about the world; we are not passive observers
- eg. sociologists see that racial categories are socially constructed; at the
same time, they see that they are real to people’s identities (Thomas
theorem)
Nature of object of study
● Concept and analytical tool vs object of study
Naturalism →empiricism is the way to absolute knowledge
- Direct relationship between observer and knowledge; there is something real to be
studied
- However, the relationship between the observer and knowledge is never without
prepositions nor objective; observations can be interpreted
16th century epistemological questions
● How do we come to know things?
- Rationalists → true knowledge is a product of deductive reasoning in the
human mind
- Empiricists → all true knowledge comes from the sense and the rational mind
is just a processing tool
David Hume’s scepticism
● Claim that all human knowledge is based on what we have perceived in the past;
however, knowledge based on the past is not a solid basis for knowledge about the
future → problem of induction
● Deductive or demonstrative reasoning
- If the premises are true, the conclusions must be true
● We cannot observe causality or a causal connection, but our mind makes the
connection and attributes it to observations
Kant’s approach: transcendental idealism
● The mind is not like Locke’s Tabula Rasa
● Real world (noumena) and perception of that world (phenomena)
● Kant rejected the idea that knowledge about the world are direct representations of
that world; the human mind interprets the sense impressions
● According to Kant, we only have knowledge about our perception of the world
● Shift in ontological orientation: from the real world out there as the nature of being to
what the mind makes of this world via sense perception
● Idealism → idea that reality is fundamentally mental
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