There was no difference between men and women. Some differences may exist, but always were probabilities.
Learn
To understand something about the hunman being, I need to be openminded, careful, critical of those who are influencing me, and critical of my own sets of beliefs.
Sociology
Sociology is an academic discipline, an attempt to seek knowledge and understanding through painstaking and critical investigation.
We can't overlook the importance of society in understanding hunman life. I can't escape the power of sociology to affect the way I think.
Six thinkers
Karl Marx
Best known for the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.
Critiques of capitalism and society
He developed a theory of society that focuses on social class, social power, and social conflict. He saw the importance of economic in society.
Social inequality is the key to understanding society.
Max Weber
Best known for The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Shared belief system——culture
Protestant religious thinking was a central contributing factor of developing capitalism.
Described the importance of culture in influencing how people act.
Emile Durkheim
Best known for Suicide and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.
Suicide rate reflects a society's level of integration and regulation
Society is able to work in unity, is the sum of the individuals who make it up.
Religion, law, education, ritual, the division of labor, and even crime play a important role in maintaining this unity.
George Herbert Mead
Best known for Mind, Self and Society.
Human nature and characterizes
how society and the human being shape each other
Symbol use, selfhood and mind are qualities that create a being that can change society and not simply be passively shaped by it.
Symbols, self and mind are created by social qualities, that means human beings are social beings.
Peter Berger
Best known for Invitation to Sociology and The Social Construction of Reality.
Sociology is a special type of consciousness, a perspective that is profound, unusual, critical, and humanistic in its concerns.
Shows the power of society to shape human action and thought.
To understand who we are and what we can do to control our lives, we should understand the power of society firstly.
C.Wright Mills
Best known for The Power of Elite and The Sociological Imagination.
American democracy was a fiction.
Showed the power of society.
Fake democracy means a few individuals control our lives.
The individual problems we all face are really caused by social problems.
The importance of rational proof
Reject authority alone as the basis for truth and should always be suspicious.
Honesty
Don't twist your thinking to prove only what you want to believe.
Although church became the source of all truth, the spirit of Greek philosophy became acceptable again in the intellectual community.
Proof, Science, and Sociology
Critical thinking
Caused by the complexity.
we should always be questioning.
The heart of rational proof is the recognition that the basis for truth must be found in reason, in a careful appraisal of ideas.
Empirical Proof
Auguste Comte said that critical methods should rely on a scientific approach, a measuring stick even more demanding than rational approach.
Not only sound logic, but also have careful observation
Example
Rational proof and empirical proof are both ways to test whether or not an idea is accurate.
Archimedes measured the volume of a mass.
Empirical proof
More empirical evidence
A study of Polish Peasants
W.I.Thomas and Florian Znaniecki(1918)
Gangs in Chicago
Frederic Thrasher and his associates (1920s)
the community of Muncie, Indiana
Robert and Helen Lynd(1920s)
The American Dilemma
Gunnar Myrdal(1944)
leadership in small groups
Robert Bales(1950s)
power in the United States
C. Wright Mills(1950s)
Observation in sociology
Scientists should watch how human beings present themselves to others and then look beyond and infer the existence of a more abstract social reality.
Every single act of human beings is something for sociologist to study.
Objectivity in science
Value-free
Separate as much as possible from our subjective perception.
Complete objectivity is impossible.
Everyone has biases.
Two assumptions of science
Natural law in science and sociology
Nature is lawful to hold that nature is governed by predictable regularities.
Human beings and human society are part of nature, and they are subject to regularities.
Natural cause in science and sociology
Natural cause assumes that the order is governed by natural law.
Cause is difficult to establish. Because of the complexity of the human being, this underlying assumption of cause is more difficult to apply with certainty in social science than it is in natural science.
Summary and conclusion
Sociology must be suspicious and this suspicion leads to a questioning, probing, doubting, analytical approach to understanding society and the human being.
Ideas must be supported by empirical research.
Sociology must constantly attempt to be objective.
The human being and human society are governed by regularities or patterns, by a set of natural laws.
