SOSC 2000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Systems Theory, Reductionism
2 Dec 2015
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Social sciences (anthropologists, economist, political scientists, psychologists, sociologists) seek causes or effect of social phenomena. Analysis of power relations (race, class, sex, gender, etc. ) Why do we want to know? b/c we believe there is a reason for everything. Harper introduced laws which made people security threats if they took part in animal rights or environmental rights. Systems thinking: deconstruct a problem into constituent parts how do the parts relate to each other and to the whole and which parts different disciplines address. Disciplinary reductionism: narrow lens insights from disciplines system of knowledge specialties looks at a complex system by focusing on part of a problem that discipline is interested in. We need to integrate these blending, synthesizing. The reason why we support interdisciplinary studies, we are combining a lot of stuff. Writing a textbook: what do chemists say about this, what do biologists say about it, what about economists. Anthropologists will say b/c its the working class.
