Topic 6: Epistemology in Social Sciences

Question 1

What’s epistemology?

Answer 1

The theory of knowledge.

Question 2

What’s materialism?

Answer 2

The current which claims that everything is matter and the only reality that exists is material.

Question 3

How’s Materialism currently represented?

Answer 3

By Marx and Engels’ Dialectical Materialism (nature is the matter that has existence independently of being thought).

Question 4

What does epistemology attempts?

Answer 4

It attempts to determine the nature of human knowledge.

Question 5

What’s Rationalism?

Answer 5

The current that states that reality can be known without any prior experience.

🔸Rene Descartes
🔸Emile Durkheim

Question 6

Empiricism

Answer 6

Asserts that prior experience is necessary to know something.

🔹Locke
🔹Hume
🔹Mill

Question 7

Realism

Answer 7

Exposes that ideas exist whether or not they are thought.

🔹 Mario Bunge
🔹 Bertrand Russell
🔹 G. E. More

Question 8

Idealism

Answer 8

Objects cannot exist without a mind that is aware of them.

🔸Plato
🔸Berkeley
🔸Kant

Question 9

Positvism

Answer 9

Asserts that all knowledge must be based on sensory experience.

🔸Bacon
🔸Comte

Question 10

Logical Positivism

Answer 10

Based on logic to avoid ambiguity. Comes from Empiricism.

🔸Vienna Circle

Question 11

Phenomenology

Answer 11

Doctrine that proposes that consciousness involves a relationship with the object and keeps the essence of the phenomenon.

🔸Edmund Husserl

Question 12

Analytic Philosophy

Answer 12

Wittgenstein says that everything that can be thought can be expressed by language and the most important function of language is to describe facts.

Question 13

Hermeneutics

Answer 13

Its object of investigation is the historical as the knowledge that can be accomplished is historically mediated.