Week 5 -

Q2: What is the fundamental nature of social reality?

  • Positivist: there is regularity or order underlying the world

  • The world is not chaotic or unpredictable

    • eg.g. the revolution of the planets around the sun

    • regularities or patterns, will hold in the future

  • More examples of regularities or patterns    

    • More men than women in HOC

    • More women than men in university

    • Rich people, on average , live longer than poor people


For positivism → In science find the pattern, and explain it

Wheel of science (Walter Wallace) laws or principles = Sociological theories

  • Scientific laws are considered ‘eternal laws” if they are correct

    • The issue is we never know if the laws we come up with are correct, usually have to be revised

  • Good theories should be able to explain things in any time period

    • Eg deviance

    • should be able to explain deviance of 100 years ago to 100 years from now


Q3: What is the basic nature of human beings?

Positivist answer has evolved over the years

  • Old answer of basic human nature → self-interested and rational

  • We are self-interested in certain situations, but altruistic (help other people without any personal gain) in other situations.

    • Altruism → Opposite of personal interest (Comte)

  • Similarly, we act rationally at time, but others, irrational

    • e.g. our actions may be heavily influenced by psychological mechanisms

  • Some positivists claim that human nature is a result from our evolutionary heritage

  • Positivists maintain that we dont simply act the way we want

    • We are subject to causal laws, those laws of nature, those general principles discussed earlier

    • Do we choose to obey the laws of gravity, no.

      • WE HAVE NO CHOICE

  • It follows we do not have free will

    • Since all behaviour is subject to causal laws then we really cant control it ourselves

    • We’re like a leaf being blown by the forces of nature


What do we call the idea that human beings DO NOT have free will?

  • Determinism

    • The “strict” positivist position

    • Not all positivists are determinists

Q4: What constitutes an explanation or theory of social reality?

• As we saw earlier, positivists claim that a scientific explanation must be based on universal laws

• For them, a good explanation involves a law-like statement


  • The search for universal laws is called the nomothetic approach to explanation

    • From the Greek “nomos” → means law

  • Positivism tends to be deductive

    • which begins with a general theory used to make specific predictions

    • General → Specific

      • eg Poverty in canada

      • Poverty is caused by a lack of marketable job skills

      • Lack of job skills → poverty

    • Positivist would take the general theory and make predictions to test the theory

    • poorest 10% of the pop of London has below average levels of marketable job skills, then gather some data to see if that is false

    • Deductive → theory testing


Opposite of deductive → Inductive

  • How does it work?

    • specific observations → general theory

  • This approach involves creating and generating theories rather than testing them

    • Start by making observations

    • Interview poor people, spend time with them

      • With that you come up with a theory of poverty

  • e.g. maybe you observed the poor people had feelings of inferiority

    • Your theory might be, low self-image causes poverty


Q5: How does one determine whether an explanation is true or false?

  • Generally, positivists claim we can never prove, beyond any doubt, that any theory is true

    • We can never be absolutely certain of any theory

  • All we have are provisional theories

    • Hang on to the theory until a better one is proposed


We can never be 100% that a theory is true, thereies are sometimes said to be substantiated or supported

  • They are substantiated are supported if they are logically consistent and consistent with facts


  • Positivists claim that the only good evidence is is if it can be perceived by our senses

→ This is the principle of empiricism

  • If the independent observers cant see, smell, feel or hear something, we dont have good evidence

Part of the rationale of communalism is that it allows for the replications

  • Repeating the study using the same methods to see if we get the same results

  • Unless the study is empirical, its impossible to do a replication

A related idea:

  • Positivists believe in intersubjectivity

    • different people observing the same phenomena, should agree on what they observed

    • Positivists argue that if there is a disagrement on these matters, someone has made a sloppy observation, or measured it improperly