Compleet overzicht en aantekeningen van het vak Sociological Theory van jaar 2 sociologie. Alle belangrijke informatie van de colleges (video's) en presentaties staat erin (inclusief afbeeldingen), en de aantekeningen zijn een goed overzicht van het hele vak! Ik heb de aantekeningen als basis van d...
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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