SOSC 3800 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1-2: Inductive Reasoning, Data Analysis, The Foundations
4 Oct 2017
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Session 2 readings - introduction to social research. Science o ers an approach to both agreement reality and experiential reality. Agreement reality - what we know as part and parcel of the culture we share with those around us. Experiential reality - what we know from personal experience and discovery. A scienti c assertion must have both logical and empirical support - it must make sense, and it must not contradict actual observation. Humans seem predisposed to undertake this task using causal and probabilistic reasoning. Future circumstances somehow caused or conditioned by present ones. Such patterns of cause and e ect are probabilistic in nature - e ects occur more often when the causes occur than when causes are absent - but not always. Agreement reality both assists and hinders our attempts to nd out for ourselves. Two important sources of our secondhand knowledge - tradition and authority.
