1. Significance of Social Science (1).pdf

significance of social sc ience

1. Significance of Social
Sciences
M. Sivakami
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M. Sivakami, SFC 3

2. What is Science?
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3. Is it Mathematics?
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4. Is it Laboratories?
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5. Is it Medical Operations?
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6. Is it High Technologies?
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7. What then is Science?
•Difficult to specify exactly what science is
•Scientist across globe disagree on the proper
definition
•Method of inquiry
–Way of leaning and knowing things about the
world around us
–A conscious, deliberate and rigorous undertaking
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8. How do we know the world
around us?
•Common sense
–Touch the candle fire or step in the fire?
•Can come from own experience or experience of others
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9. •What is the colour of milk?
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10. Are they tress?
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11. Major step for science
•When humans first learned to use fire and later
make fire themselves
•Number of chemical and physical process
emerged from this knowledge
•The contribution made by people like Aristotle
(from Greece), Newton to name a few.
–Reasoning
–We moved from common sense and power above
(god) to science
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12. •Mathematics- Science of numbers
•Physics- the one concerned with physical
things
•Chemistry-the one concerned with
chemical properties
•Biology- Based on and making use of all
of them
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13. Social Science (1)
•SS is concerned about Society, i.e. the human
aspects of the world
•Aims at understanding all aspects of society as
well as finding solutions to deal with the
problem
–Work is to watch where society has been heading and
what more care be done to benefit the entire race
•Example: Health
•Very much present in today's life and everyday
life
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14. Social Science (2)
•SS is broad area of knowledge and includes several
disciplines under its domain
–Crowning them all was Philosophy (love for wisdom or knowledge)
– Aristotle’s reasoning was based on “philosophy”
•Each of these subjects splitting into finer and finer
specializations when knowledge started to expand
•Fundamental point to all these subjects is “Social
Reasoning”
–It is complex
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15. Looking for reality
•Reality is a tricky issue
•All what you know is true?
•If not, how can you know what is
real?
•Inquiry
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16. Tradition
•“What everybody knows”
–Inherit from the culture
•Throw the apple above
•It offers some clear advantage to our
human inquiry
–We are not starting things from scratch in our search
for regularities and understanding
•At the same time, it may hinder human
inquiry from seeking fresh understanding
–Newton’s contribution (law of motion)
•Looked down when you try to seek more
understanding for things that people already know
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17. Authority
•What do you do when new knowledge appears
each day?
•Acceptance of new knowledge depends on the
depth of the person’s knowledge in the
respective contributions
–Example: Fever
•Authority can assist and hinder human inquiry
–Assist: when the person has special training,
expertise and credentials
–Hinder: Experts speaking outside their realm
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18. Tradition and Authority
•Both of these provide us with the
starting point for our inquiry
•It can lead you to start at the wrong
point or push you to make greater
contributions
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19. Errors in Inquiry
•Inaccurate Observations
•Overgeneralization
•Selective Observations
•Illogical Reasoning
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20. Three views on reality
•The pre-modern view
•The modern view
•The postmodern view
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21. The Pre-modern view
•It guided most of human history
•Spirits and god
–God created humans and the world
–Need to accept things as they are
•Evil sitting on your head
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22. The Modern view
•Humans evolved and become aware of
the diversity
•Modern view accepts such diversity as
legitimate

•Different people have different views
–For some, apple is red
–For some, apple is green
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23. The Postmodern view
•Spirits or evils do not exist
•“REAL” and “TRUE” but with logic
and objectivity
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24. Which one is a real?
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25. Arguments between Husband
and Wife
•The husband’s points of view of “Wife”
•The wife’s points of view of “Husband”
•Your point of view as an “observer”
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26. How do we arrive to the reality?
•Established scientific procedures
(methods) allow us to deal effectively
with different kind of dilemma
•Quantitative and qualitative methods come in
picture
•Different philosophical stances give us
powerful range of possibilities
•Theory
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27. Foundations of Social
Science or fundamental ideas
•The two pillars of science
–Logic and observation
•They relate the three main aspects
of social science
–Theory, data collection, and data
analysis
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28. •Social Regularities
– aims to find patterns of regularity in social life
–Though there are exceptions
•Aggregates, Not Individuals
–Collective behaviour of many individuals
–Try to understand the system or culture in which
people operate
•Through variables
–In order to arrive to the above two points
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29. Variety of social science
research approaches
•Idiographic and Nomothetic Explanation
•Inductive and Deductive Theory
•Qualitative and Quantitative Data
•Pure and Applied Research
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30. Idiographic and Nomothetic
Explanation
•Idiographic
–Why did you join at TISS?
–Why did India lose to West Indies or Australia in
cricket?
•Exhaust your reasoning for an event
•Nomothetic
–Why did India lose to West Indies or Australia
when they play outside India?
•Seek to identify a few causal factors
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31. Inductive and Deductive Theory
Inductive approach
Deductive approach
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32. Qualitative and Quantitative
Data
•Distinction between numerical and non-
numerical data
•Example: Intelligent (qualitative and more like
idiographic)
•IQ of 120 (quantitative and more like nomothetic)
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33. Pure and Applied Research
•Pure Research
–Gaining knowledge for the knowledge ‘s sake
–Pushing the boundary of knowledge
•Applied research
–Apply the research in many ways for effective
social interventions
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Thank you
[email protected]
Reference book for this class:
Earl Babbie, 2016 or 2013, The Practice of Social Research. 14 and 13
th

Edition, Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, Belmont, California.
Chapter 1 An introduction to Inquiry Page no 4-31.