First lecture will be held on October 6, Jinonice 6004

Following an approach to inquiry centered on intellectual problem, the course seeks to provide students with critical faculties to understand, evaluate, and employ the various approaches to social inquiry which he/she will encounter in other social science courses. It also confronts foundational (philosophical, sociological, and psychological) problems unavoidably bound up with social and political inquiry whether or not we are aware of it: For example, how to formulate research problems, how to deal with the relationship between facts and the concepts and frameworks used to describe and explain facts, what to make of the ideal of a science of politics, social and political phenomena, how to deal with the unavoidable value-ladenness of social science and the subjectivity of its human objects, what are the purposes and uses of social inquiry, what is the relationship between social science and political philosophy?

Condensed course outline

I. Problems, Problem Situations, and Problem Formulation

A. Research: Method of topics versus method of problems.

B. Research questions: How to make them interesting and substantial.

C. What constitutes a "problem"? How to formulate them.

E. What about truth? Is scholarship a truth-seeking enterprise or ideology?

II. Concepts and Reality

A. Words and concepts as opposed to facts and things

B Background knowledge as interpretive prejudice

C. Concepts: essential instruments for organization, simplification, and comprehension of reality and, simultaneously, unavoidably distorting lenses

D. Nature and necessity of concepts.

E. Conceptual frameworks underlying social science "theories"

III. Positivistic ("Scientific") Social Science

A. What is "Positivism" and who are "Positivists"?

B. Positivism and the problem of knowledge.

C. "Scientific Method": The Positivist View

D. Where positivist approaches can be useful.

E. Positivist approaches as thought-blockers and reality-distorters

IV. Foundational Problems of inquiry I

A. Social science, natural science, and humanities: Similarities and Differences

B. Popper’s anti-foundationist, conjectural-critical approach to knowledge

C. Ideology or science: Truth versus opinion

D. The problem of hypostatization, reification, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

E. Reality of social structures and social things

V. Foundational Problems of inquiry II

A. Norms (values and methods), metaphysics, and the conjectural-critical approach

B. Varieties of explanation in social science and the humanities.

C. Reconciling the general and the unique: Area studies, case studies, and history versus the generalizing thrust of theoretical science.

D. Social science, social engineering, and technology: Similarities, differences, and interrelationships.