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What's your favorite science? (pg. 14)
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| RJT |
Also, defining science in terms of the so-called "scientific method" is completely absurd to me, and the only reason I seem to see it continue to happen is so that the so-called "hard" sciences can have a default response to make the claim that sociology, psychology, etc. are not really science.
I really, really hate that the public education system in the U.S. plays the "it's only science if it adheres to the scientific method" card so heavily with kids these days, because it only contributes to the perpetuation of dogmatic practices, and rarely inspires anyone to look beyond accepted scientific paradigms for what could be a more complete explanation for a phenomena than is already accepted.
Discoveries by Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein (among others) would never have happened if they just accepted the explanations of their contemporaries without question. It saddens me to no end that individuals going to school for a scientific education rarely seem to study the history and context of their own disciplines, and only seem concerned with teaching students how they should go about things in a manner that amounts to little more than continuing the work of who came before you. |
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
Did you read this bit?:
| quote: | | In the second edition of SSR, Kuhn added a postscript in which he elaborated his ideas on the nature of scientific progress. He described a thought experiment involving an observer who has the opportunity to inspect an assortment of theories, each corresponding to a single stage in a succession of theories. What if the observer is presented with these theories without any explicit indication of their chronological order? Kuhn anticipates that it will be possible to reconstruct their chronology on the basis of the theories' scope and content, because the more recent a theory is, the better it will be as an instrument for solving the kinds of puzzle that scientists aim to solve. Kuhn remarked: "That is not a relativist's position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress." |
;)
I've read Kuhn. Scientific paradigm changes means that the theoretical entities and some methodological assumptions differ between scientific eras, sure, but there is still certainly a sense in which science progresses, and Kuhn acknowledges it -- theories have better predictive power, and we can "do more" with them in a practical sense. Regardless of whether you want to get into philosophical debates about whether theories can "map" to reality, only the most insane kind of PoMo bullters (a category which doesn't include Kuhn) would deny those two facts. |
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| PETRAN |
| quote: | Originally posted by RJT
Also, defining science in terms of the so-called "scientific method" is completely absurd to me, and the only reason I seem to see it continue to happen is so that the so-called "hard" sciences can have a default response to make the claim that sociology, psychology, etc. are not really science.
I really, really hate that the public education system in the U.S. plays the "it's only science if it adheres to the scientific method" card so heavily with kids these days, because it only contributes to the perpetuation of dogmatic practices, and rarely inspires anyone to look beyond accepted scientific paradigms for what could be a more complete explanation for a phenomena than is already accepted.
Discoveries by Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein (among others) would never have happened if they just accepted the explanations of their contemporaries without question. It saddens me to no end that individuals going to school for a scientific education rarely seem to study the history and context of their own disciplines, and only seem concerned with teaching students how they should go about things in a manner that amounts to little more than continuing the work of who came before you. |
Psychology is a "medium" science not a "soft" one like sociology, due to he fact that the majority of researchers use the naturalistic (experimental) method to investigate mental and behavioural phenomena. In that terms, its closer to biological sciences rather than social ones (and actually it is neither, it is part of the "behavioural sciences"...well its the only science that belongs to that lol)since both fields use experiments and statistical analyses to derive to results, but the formulation of the theories is mostly qualitative (with words, e.g. the cell is comprised by this and that bla bla, visual perception goes from surface to semantic identification of objects in a scene bla bla). Furthermore, most research in sociology is not quantitative but qualitative. The reason for this, is not because sociologists are lazy bastards who are bored to do stuff, but because their object of their study is so complex (comprised by countless factors making the system chaotic and unpredictive) that its impossible to handle these concepts simply with numbers/calculations and make predictions about them. See my previous posts haha. :o |
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| RJT |
| quote: | Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles
Did you read this bit?:
;)
I've read Kuhn. Scientific paradigm changes means that the theoretical entities and some methodological assumptions differ between scientific eras, sure, but there is still certainly a sense in which science progresses, and Kuhn acknowledges it -- theories have better predictive power, and we can "do more" with them in a practical sense. Regardless of whether you want to get into philosophical debates about whether theories can "map" to reality, only the most insane kind of PoMo bullters (a category which doesn't include Kuhn) would deny those two facts. |
I think you're taking that a bit out of context. Kuhn wasn't talking about progress in the sense that he feels individuals working within a given field are actually finding better and more explanatory theories, he was talking about how over a large period of time and through several paradigm changes we have arrived at what he feels is a more complete understanding of how the physical world works around us than we have ever had before.
What you didn't acknowledge was that he doesn't necessarily believe that:
A. We've got any real indication to think we've got anything particularly "right" in any kind of long term, objective sense.
B. That Kuhn's idea of progress maps onto the broad field of "science", and does not refer to any discipline in particular.
So basically, by your own argument from Kuhn's position, wouldn't you have to acknowledge the "soft" sciences as genuine science, as the theories they entail have more explanatory and predictive power than those that came before them?
:conf:
I just think you're talking out of both sides of your mouth in discussing progress here - at the very least we're talking about two very, very different ideas of what constitutes scientific progress, and I don't think you can really bang the drum for one without being careful to describe how it actually affects the other. |
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| PETRAN |
| quote: | Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles
Did you read this bit?:
;)
I've read Kuhn. Scientific paradigm changes means that the theoretical entities and some methodological assumptions differ between scientific eras, sure, but there is still certainly a sense in which science progresses, and Kuhn acknowledges it -- theories have better predictive power, and we can "do more" with them in a practical sense. Regardless of whether you want to get into philosophical debates about whether theories can "map" to reality, only the most insane kind of PoMo bullters (a category which doesn't include Kuhn) would deny those two facts. |
So, according to you sociological theories don't have predictive power? Why is that? Is it because of the method of study or due to the object of sociology itself?
In archaeology they don't do experiments (in a matter of fact-and as far as i know- there is nothing quantitative about any archaeological method except maybe for some practical techniques in dating objects like carbon decay and stuff) yet we know a load about ancient civilizations. And these facts don't derive from some experiment but from carefull intuition and comparison of a range of factors including, art, written information, objects,items, architecture, the environemnt of that era). All these methods are qualitative, but still, they have resulted in some great scientific facts. If archeology is succesfull (which studies the societies of the past) i can't see how sociology could fail given that the object of sociological study is much easier to allocate and explore in systematic ways (since it explores present or recent societies). |
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
| quote: | Originally posted by RJT
So basically, by your own argument from Kuhn's position, wouldn't you have to acknowledge the "soft" sciences as genuine science, as the theories they entail have more explanatory and predictive power than those that came before them? |
But do they entail that?
That's basically what I've been asking this whole time. That was the point of the request for a sociological hypothesis or theory that had been confirmed or refuted by observation of some kind, and the point of asking whether sociologists saw their own "field" as making progress in terms of explanatory power.
| quote: | | I just think you're talking out of both sides of your mouth in discussing progress here - at the very least we're talking about two very, very different ideas of what constitutes scientific progress... |
I see scientific progress within a field as an increased ability to predict observations in that field's domain. That's the idea I've been running with this whole time, even if I didn't make it very explicit before. |
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
| quote: | Originally posted by PETRAN
So, according to you sociological theories don't have predictive power? |
I don't really know whether they do. That's why I've been asking this whole time for someone familiar with sociology to provide examples -- of theories that made right or wrong predictions and were therefore either confirmed or refuted. |
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| RJT |
| quote: | Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles
But do they entail that?
That's basically what I've been asking this whole time. That was the point of the request for a sociological hypothesis or theory that had been confirmed or refuted by observation of some kind, and the point of asking whether sociologists saw their own "field" as making progress in terms of explanatory power. |
I think they do, but it sounds like you're asking the "Does it adhere to the Scientific Method?" question I was discussing earlier, and if that's the way you demarcate science, that's fair enough. I just think it's very shortsighted and denies the explanatory power of theories can have regardless of whether or not they can be done in such narrow terms as the SM.
And of course if you take this line and continue to ask "Can you prove to me that sociological theories predict anything?", you're never going to get a satisfactory response, and so as long as you ask, this kind of vicious cycle of "Can they?", "Yes, they can." dialog is going to continue ad nauseum with no end.
| quote: | Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles
I see scientific progress within a field as an increased ability to predict observations in that field's domain. That's the idea I've been running with this whole time, even if I didn't make it very explicit before. |
Progress, in this sense, is then just akin to Kuhn's puzzle analogy in which the point of scientific education is for individuals to continue the work of those who came before them, and not scientific discovery. I can agree that adding pieces to the puzzle to get a more complete picture creates a better understanding of the world around us, but history has consistently proven that accepted paradigms can be undermined relatively easily by somewhat minor or accidental discoveries, and this is the important fact that I think modern scientific education, and much of modern science, tries to deny. |
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| Audious |
| quote: | Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
drunk animals? |
Meant cryptozoology. :p
Posted that right before I went to bed at 3:00 AM. |
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| elFreak |
| my favourite science is dumb whore |
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| NeoPhono |
It sounds like there's a blurring going on of academic pursuit and science. Just because something ends in "ology" doesn't mean it's a science. Like archeology. Archeology may use scientific means to learn about ancient civilizations, but in terms of producing empiric, reproducible data in order to predict and understand natural phenomena, it really doesn't fit the bill. Archeology is basically "hands on" history, and history isn't a science.
Sociology is a tough one because you can argue that it has some predictive power, but no real predictive authority. I think that is what science looks for, and until you can begin making definitive predictions of the actions of a society, it's going to be hard to consider sociology a science. Until then, it will be just like history or archeology in that it hopes to better define and understand the actions of a group of people, but can't definitively predict it's actions. It can show trends and give reasonable predictions, but you can't use it to authoritatively predict the impact of some variable on society. |
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| RJT |
| quote: | Originally posted by NeoPhono
It can show trends and give reasonable predictions, but you can't use it to authoritatively predict the impact of some variable on society. |
Isn't that all any science can do (with varying degrees of accuracy)?
:conf: |
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