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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
A 3 page essay paper that draws on sources to discuss the relationship between social research, tradition, authority and epistemology. Bibliography lists 3 sources.
Page Count:
3 pages (~225 words per page)
File: KL9_khsrepi.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
this topic, that is, the topic of epistemology, the "science of knowing," causing the reader to contemplate how knowledge is acquired (Babbie, 2008, p. 6). Basically, knowledge is defined and
disseminated through scientific inquiry, ordinary human inquiry, and via the heritage of tradition, with authority also having a profound influence. "Social research" is a term that specifically refers to
how social scientists investigate the realities of human social life (Babbie, 2008). While some of their methods follow traditional, empirical scientific method, many of their investigations are specifically designed to
examine sociological concerns (Babbie, 2008). How do we know what we know? First of all, everyone learns from his or her own experiments into the principles of cause-and-effect. A
young child is repeatedly warned that an object is hot, but, usually, the child at some point will touch it anyway, learning from the pain that the object is indeed
hot and to be avoided. Scientific inquiry makes "these concepts of causality and probability more explicit and provides techniques for dealing with them more rigorously than does causal human inquiry"
(Babbie, 2008, p. 6). The scientific method evolved from the contributions of numerous thinkers, but primarily those who lived during the Enlightenment era of the eighteenth century, such as
Rene Descartes, who formulated the innovative idea that sensory information is not a reliable foundation on which to base knowledge. Descartes observed that sometimes the senses can "deceive us concerning
things which are hardly perceptible, or very far away" (Descartes, 2007, p. 22). Nevertheless, while Descartes, theoretically, rejected everything he had previously believed as accurate knowledge and started over, this
is not actually possible, as there is a vast amount of knowledge that is part of our heritage and guides us in coping with reality and survival. As Babbie points
...