My Drawing of a Paradigm

This is my idea of what a "paradigm" map looks like. I think if you click on it the image will open up as a bigger picture. Also, the new "paradigm" could also be considered a paradigm shift. Although Kuhn argued that it is not linear I think the way he described it is.

The necessity of sociology

What did everyone think about the notion that there will eventually be no need for sociology (as discussed in Wolfe's piece last class)? In class, I expressed my view that society will never be able to go "unstudied," and that a subject as diverse and fascinating as human society will always demand its own discipline in order to examine it. I was just wondering what everyone else thought about this, especially those of you who are senior sociology majors and will be looking for jobs soon.

Wolfe on the professionalization of sociologists

I promised to give you all a page number for where Wolfe talks about how social scientists emulated the natural science model to raise their professional status. On page 48, Wolfe writes:

The scientific model may not, finally, have taught all that much about social reality, but it did deal extremely well with the reality of who social scientists were and what they aspired to be. Its set of rules for professional behavior enables its practitioners to resolve some exceptionally awkward questions about what social scientists, as opposed to social science, ought to do. Social scientists could attempt to be objective, even if social science could not. Social scientists could follow well-known rules, even if reality did not.

Enjoy!

theories vs. paradigms

After last weeks discussion about paradigms versus theories I am still confused as to why authors of Sociology textbooks are mixing up these terms. As I stated last class, in my Methods textbook the author referred to theories as paradigms. When I was reading about the founding fathers of Sociology in an introductory textbook I found that theories were again referred to as paradigms. Are we mistaken or are the authors of these textbooks? Why do some authors call these concepts theories and others call them paradigms?

responce paper

hey,

do u guys know if were are susposed to post the responce papers or just email them?

Images of Kuhn

After class, a student mentioned others ways to represent pictorially Kuhn's sense of the relationship between "paradigms." Here's one image from Wikipedia, which compares Kuhn to Karl Popper and Feyerabend. Want to draw your own?

Howard Becker's famous "pot piece"

In class on Tuesday, I mentioned Howard Becker's famous piece on how people learn to smoke pot (or whatever one calls it these days). If you are on the Trinity network, you can access this article here. I've also linked it in the right-hand sidebar of this page, along with other articles I have mentioned in class. In this piece, Becker writes:

...being high consists of two elements: the presence of symptoms caused by marihuana use and the recognition of these symptoms and their connection by the user with his use of the drug. It is not enough, that is, that the effects be present; they alone do not automatically provide the experience of being high. The user must be able to point them out to himself and consciously connect them with his having smoke marihauna before he can have this experience (pg 237 - 238).

How might you connect this comment to what we are doing in the class?

First Post

This is my first post. After doing my reaction paper this week, and reading Kuhn's book, the comparison between our Senior Seminar readings and Social Theory readings was very clear to me. I found a lot of similarities between some of the pieces, but the overlay helped me in analyzing Kuhn's piece. Did anyone else find these similarities?