Social Scientific Inquiry-Social Stratification

Social Scientific Inquiry-Social Stratification

Question:

My Thesis statement/ Question here is the following:

“Social Stratification is a natural phenomenon; therefore, it can never be eradicated from the society, although the basis of social stratification can vary across from individual to individual and from society to society.”

Social Scientific Analysis:

The American philosopher and scientist Charles Sanders Peirce maintained that there are four general ways of establishing beliefs. The poorest of these, the method of tenacity, involves a person stubbornly clinging to a familiar idea when challenged. The belief gets sustained by an attitude of tenacity and unquestioned acceptance. The method of authority maintains that ideas held to be true simply. As they are the ideas of a person, who deemed an expert or perceived to be in a position of power. Peirce noted that this method is superior to the method of tenacity, because some beliefs can be fixed by adopting the method. The a priori method, which is better than both of the methods just mentioned, involves an appeal to the powers of reason independent of empirical observation. It involves accepting beliefs that they are intuitive, self-evident, and based on reason rather than experience. The method of science is the method that Peirce himself advocated. It is superior to the other three methods because it establishes belief by appeal to an external reality and not to something merely human. Unlike the other methods, which are pre-scientific, the method of science has the characteristic of self-correction because it has inbuilt checks along the way.

Inductive Method:

The idea that the scientific method involves inductive reasoning goes back at least to Aristotle. Given a heavy emphasis by Francis Bacon and John Stuart Mill. Inductive reasoning takes different forms. For example, it is to be found in the fashioning of statistical generalizations, in the Bayesian assignment of probabilities to hypotheses, and in the reasoning involved in moving from data to hypotheses in the hypothetico-deductive method.

Hypothetico-Deductive Method:

The most popular account of method in science is the hypothetico-deductive method, which has been the method of choice in the natural sciences for more than 150 years. The method has come to assume hegemonic status in the behavioral sciences, which have repeatedly placed a heavy emphasis on testing hypotheses in terms of their predictive success. Relatedly, the use of traditional statistical significance test procedures often embedded in a hypothetico-deductive structure. The hypothetico-deductive method characteristically described in one of two ways: On one account, the scientist takes a hypothesis or a theory and tests it indirectly by deriving from it one or more observational predictions, which are amenable to direct empirical test.

If the predictions borne out by the data, then that the result taken as a confirming instance of the theory in question. If the predictions fail to square with the data, then that fact counts as a disconfirming instance of the theory. The second account is from Karl Popper, who construes the hypothetico-deductive method in falsificationist terms.Hypotheses that successfully withstand such criticism said to be corroborated, which is a noninductive notion ...