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Can social scientists produce reliable knowledge about the world, and if…
Can social scientists produce reliable knowledge about the world, and if so, how? (CCH2A)
To what extent does statistical significance provide a solution to the problem of confirming hypotheses that we saw in the natural sciences, and see again here in the human sciences?
It's possible to get results that appear to be statistically significant but actually aren't (like the horoscope example from HS4).
Statistical relationships don't reveal patterns of causation -- they give us correlations, and then we need to try to establish causation.
The movement from general to specific and specific to general is really interesting. Someone made a distinction between the natural sciences moving from specific observations to general rules, and the human sciences trying to make observations at a mass scale that can make
Just because an idea/explanation/treatment is shown to work, and that effect is statistically significant, that doesn't mean that it will work for you.
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What does the example of predicting the behavior of gas molecules suggest about the possibilities of predicting and explaining human behaviors?
In the reading (HS4) they say that it's possible to make general claims, and that the problem comes in when you try to pick out/make predictions about specific cases. This is like trying to predict the behavior of specific atoms/molecules, which we can't really do.
Free will is a factor
It's worth asking how free we really are. There are so many factors in our lives that are outside of our control. This might actually add extra variability and make predictions more difficult (because those factors are random).
There's a perspective on freedom (called determinism) that says that we aren't really free. Instead, we are basically physical objects that obey physical laws.
If this true: 1) there's no such thing as ethical responsibility, 2) people should be quite predictable instead, 3) the human sciences might be seen as a branch of the natural sciences.
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On the one hand, it's clearly hard to make predictions in the human sciences; they might be probabilistic, and they might also be general. But it's the whole point of the human sciences to be able to make general claims, isn't it?
There's an argument to be made that the human sciences can give us knowledge that is reliable only to a certain extent (an extent that's more limited than we find in the natural sciences or in math, for example)
There are variables/factors that we may not understand completely, and therefore can't completely account for.
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