Upon completion of this chapter, the student should be able to:
- Define and illustrate agreement reality.
- Define and illustrate experiential reality.
- Identify the two criteria for scientists to accept the reality of something they have not personally experienced.
- Differentiate epistemology from methodology.
- Define and illustrate causal reasoning and probabilistic reasoning.
- Differentiate the scientific approach from the native human inquiry approach to causal and probabilistic reasoning.
- Differentiate prediction from understanding.
- Describe the roles of tradition and authority as sources of secondhand knowledge.
- Define and illustrate each of the following errors in personal human inquiry: inaccurate observation, overgeneralization, selective observation, and illogical reasoning.
- Show how a scientific approach attempts to provide safeguards against each one of these errors.
- Define and illustrate the premodern, the modern and the postmodern approaches to reality.
- Describe what is meant by science being logico-empirical.
- Describe the three major aspects of the overall scientific enterprise.
- Define theory and indicate how it differs from philosophy or belief.
- Give three examples of social regularities.
- Define aggregate and present a rationale for why social scientists examine aggregates.
- Give four examples of variables and their respective attributes.
- Differentiate independent and dependent variables by definition and example, and show how they contribute to understanding causality.
- Define and illustrate the three purposes of social research.
- Define and contrast an idiographic explanation with a nomothetic explanation.
- Define and indicate how inductive theory differs from deductive theory.
- Define and give examples of quantitative data and qualitative data.
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