How can we justify what we claim to know to others?
This gives rise to questions about features of the world that make our knowledge of it possible, but also potentially fallible.
How do we explain how knowledge is produced?
How do we explain erroneous beliefs and how do we know that they are erroneous?
WHAT IS SCIENCE?
These issues are connected to the emergence of science and its self-understanding
It is a product of strict ‘norms’ – method
It is secured by institutions that reinforce these norms – universities, research laboratories, peer-review journals.
Science is presented as rising above particular contexts (universality), but has a history, which, insofar as it involves changing ideas, must also be a history of error and correcting error.
WHAT IS SCIENCE?
The possibility of ‘objectivity’ in circumstances of possible ‘subjective bias’
Science is a social activity, which implies human beings are of nature and distinct from it, capable of acting in relation to it and ‘misrepresenting it’.
Representing nature and representing society may be different activities.
Natural science might be thought of as a human activity accounting for a reality external to that activity
Social inquiry is more problematic. It is an activity accounting for human activities of which it is a part.
What does this mean?....
SOCIAL INQUIRY
Debates on the nature of social inquiry are implicated with debates on natural science.
Pluralism of positions and conflicting ontological claims about the (true) nature of natural and social worlds.
Pluralism of positions and conflicting epistemological claims about how these natural and social worlds can be represented in knowledge.
These differences more pronounced in social inquiry
SOCIAL INQUIRY
Generalities/ regularities:
‘Structures’ – these are frequently taken-for-granted or routinised.
‘Cultures’ – humans are social beings and their behaviours are reinforced by groups and the meanings that inform their interactions.
Unique events and ‘unintended consequences’:
Emphasis on ‘particularities’ and case study approaches.
Unlikely that social inquiry wouldn’t address objects of inquiry that involved a mix of structural and cultural regularities and unique case-specific events.
