Scientific Determinism & Lysenko

All things can be scientifically determined and predicted using science. Determinism: whatever
happens happens necessarily. Every event has a cause(s). Lysenkos idea was accepted by Stalin. The
modern period was characterized by a belief that the world could be reinvented in light of the
superior understanding provided by modern thinking. The communists were major proponents of
this movement. A model of improvement based on the idea that changes in the environment could
cause changes in animals and plants that would be passed on to the next generation was very
attractive. It meant that "the working class were not slaves of the past but creators of the future"??

Dialectical Materialism

Hegel (Dialectic & idealist) & Ludwig(Materialism) ->

There are many lessons to be learned from the Lysenko affair. It is certainly an example of what can
happen when scientists let political ideology intrude on science. It also illustrates what can happen
when one paradigm is so entrenched that disagreeing with it is considered traitorous. In this case,
the paradigm was Marxist-Leninist political and scientific philosophy, which was officially and
brutally supported by the Soviet bureaucracy.

Stalin justification of 1930 mass killing

Positivism: Response to Metaphysical & Magical Explanations

A fundamental assumption of positivism is that the use of the scientific method is the primary or
only way of discovering truths about the world.
This perspective emerged during the Renaissance (about 1450-1600) and the Enlightenment (1600-
1800) as part of a general move toward the use of experiments and observations to discover truths
about the world. During that period, William Harvey discovered that blood circulates through the
body, and Copernicus proposed that the planets, including Earth, revolve around the sun.

The Middle Ages (330-1450)

The Middle Ages lasted from about 330 to 1450 in Europe, and intellectual life in the latter part of
this period was dominated by two characteristics: a reverence for the knowledge of Greek and
Roman scholars such as Aristotle and an emphasis on the value of the Christian religion as a source
of truth about the world around us. Scholastic scholars were more likely to write books to
communicate the thinking of Aristotle than conduct original experiments or carry out systematic
observations. However, attributing what we believe, our truths, to a god is a traditional road to all
sorts of problems and disasters.
(The Crusades in the Middle Ages (1096-1270) are an example of conflicts based on different
religious beliefs. The crusades were a series of military expeditions promoted by the papacy during
the Middle Ages, initially aimed at taking the Holy Land for Christendom. The concept of a crusade
was developed in the eleventh century partially as a result of organised Christian forces fighting
Muslims in Sicily and Spain. The Holy Land had been in the hands of the Muslims since 638, and it
was against them that the crusades were, at least nominally, directed.)
The Renaissance (1450-1600): The Beginning of Empiricism
Greek and Roman scholarship and the Christian religion became less important in efforts to discover
how the world really is. Roger Bacon advocated this shift as early as 1268:
Having laid down the main points of the wisdom of the Latins as regards language, mathematics
and optics, I wish now to review the principles of wisdom from the point of view of experimental
science, because without experiment it is impossible to know anything thoroughly.
Bacon was also clearly aware that other forms of knowing were still competing with the scientific
method.

It is not an overstatement to say that the growing reliance on scientific method during this era was a
response to a culture that accepted the pronouncements of magicians, the beliefs of the Scholastics
and the church hierarchy.

As a young mathematics professor at the University of Pisa, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). (Story
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) designed a simple experiment to test Aristotle's assertion that heavier
objects fall faster than lighter objects; he dropped light and heavy objects from the Leaning Tower,
Geocentric versus heliocentric)
Galileo was tried for heresy by the Inquisition and was sentenced to life imprisonment;

The Age of Enlightenment (1600-1800): Empiricism as a Major Source of Knowledge

During this era systematic observation and a rudimentary scientific method became a major source
of knowledge, and competing sources continued to decline in influence.

Since the Enlightenment the term empiricism gradually has come to mean the use of the scientific
method to learn about the world.

Eighteenth-century philosophers called their century the Age of Enlightenment. From our
perspective, however, there is good reason to include the 17th century in this period. During that
earlier century, the debate between rationalists (e.g., Descartes, Spinoza) and empiricists (e.g.,
Bacon, Locke) came into sharp focus, early scientists (e.g., Galileo, Newton) wrote new rules of
inquiry, and faith in the power of human reason (humanism) prevailed.

By 1800, the fantastic successes of science in fields such as biology, chemistry, and physics had
elevated empirical science to a position well above that of its competitors as a source of truth.

Since its inception psychology has focused on Experimentation. Another reason for the adoption of a
scientific approach was psychology's desire to be accepted as a "real" science like the physical
sciences. Psychology in the 20th century, especially American psychology, was heavily influenced by
logical positivism. The naive positivist position assumes that if you follow the rules set down for good
research, your data will reveal the truth about the world. This is called a correspondence theory of
truth because research is supposed to tell you which theories correspond to what is in the external
world.

Psychology in the 20th century, especially American psychology, was heavily influenced by logical
positivism. By limiting sources of knowledge to logic and experience, the logical positivists excluded
synthetic a priori knowledge. That is, no knowledge was accepted as given regardless of the source
(but especially if the source was religion or traditional philosophy). Instead they proposed the
famous verifiability principle. A statement of fact was meaningless unless it could be validated
established as true or falsethrough experience (at least in principle). If you could not specify a way
to test whether a statement was true or false, then the statement had no meaning and no place in
science.

Positivism in social sciences

Smith (1989) traces the importing of positivism into the social sciences to French philosopher
Auguste Comte. Comte's positivism was an effort to replace the confidence that had been placed in
religion, and other ancient sources, with science. By the time the social sciences emerged as
separate disciplines in the 19th century, the natural sciences had adopted positivism. They had also
been spectacularly successful, and many of the founders of the social sciences wanted to adopt the
same approach when studying human behavior. The next section explores another paradigm, critical
theory.

Post positivism

In the 1930s and 1940s Sir Karl Popper and others published devastating criticisms of logical
positivism, or naive positivism as it is sometimes called. For example, Popper pointed out that logical
positivism assumed that through well-constructed experiments, you could arrive at the truth about
something. Popper showed that you could not because there is always the possibility that the data
gathered do not represent reality. Data that disprove a hypothesis are more definitive than data that
support a hypothesis. Post positivism in the Popper tradition takes a falsificationist approach.

Critical Theory: A Response to Inequities in Society

The beliefs in critical theory are tied intimately to the emergence of Marxism in the 19th century.
Critical theory was built on the foundation of Marxism by scholars who thought that classical Marxist
theory was not sufficient to deal with the complex social and economic structure of modern
societies.

Thus, from a Marxist perspective there is a conflict between classes in society, and if we allow the
conflict to run its course the result will be the ruin of all classes. Classical Marxism (or historical
materialism) saw revolution as the most likely means.

Because of their ideology Marxists may look at the same data and come to radically different
conclusions than postpositivists. Consider a Marxist perspective on the American Civil War that was
published on a Web site for The Militant, an Australian Marxist journal. Take for example the
American Civil War of 1861-65.

The Frankfurt School: The Beginnings of Critical Theory

If critical theory were defined briefly, a central point would be the "emancipatory imperative
directed towards the abolition of social injustice and . . . [the focus] principally on a critique of
ideology, showing how repressive interests underlie the ostensibly neutral formulations of science,
politics, economics, and culture in general"
This emphasis on both making domination and subjugation obvious and helping oppressed groups to free
themselves led critical theorists to use established research methods in quite different ways and also to develop
new methods.
Interpretivism: A Response to the Excesses of "Scientific" Social Science

The interpretivist paradigm is enjoying a resurgence (Heshusius & Ballard, 1996), but it has always
been at least a minor force in the social sciences.
The paradigm combines two essential threads of thought that can be traced back at least to Greek
and Roman philosophy.
One is the idea that the experience of the senses (empiricism) is not always the best way to know
something. Rationalism, as you will see, has been proposed as an alternative to empiricism for
thousands of years. Rationalism, the idea that you can come to know reality by thinking about it, was
an important element of Plato's philosophy. For rationalists, thinking and reflecting are important aspects
of the process of knowing.

The second thread is relativism. Relativism is the idea that the reality we perceive is always
conditioned by our experiences and our culture. We can never be sure that what we think is real is a
true reflection of the out-there.

Admittedly, Plato's truth is a mental or metaphysical one rather than the truth of physical reality
proposed by the empiricists. But it is a form of reality that exists outside the minds of individuals.
Instead of an idealistic rationalism, most interpretivists are relativists instead of idealists: Therefore,
according to a relativist thesis, knowledges produced by scientific method are not "transferable" or
"translatable" knowledgesthey can exhibit consistency with the epistemological foundations of a
particular "science"but cannot be taken to be universally true.

The idea that the social sciences are like the natural sciences did not go unchallenged. In fact, there was a strong
reaction against this view. according to Kant, to conduct objective research from which your views and
subjective opinions are completely separate. William Dilthey addressed the irrelevance of the empirical
approach in the social sciences. Dilthey rejected the empiricist purpose for science: the discovery of
generalizations and laws. Instead, as Smith (1989, p. 121) notes, he felt we should "undertake an interpretive
understanding of the individual or the type."

Interpretivism was thus a response against positivism and empiricism. It is essentially a reaction
against the idea that you can use the same research methods and paradigms in the social sciences as
are used in the natural sciences.

Postmodernism

It is an age in which the multiple perspectives of new media tend to dissolve any sharp line between
reality and fantasy, undermining belief in an objective reality. Postmodernism thus questions the
benefits of progress and challenges the idea that the scientific method is the sole source of
knowledge. Postmodernism has influenced both critical theory and interpretivism.
Critical: because it highlights the negative results of progress on oppressed peoples. It points out the
impact of different forms of progress, such as industrialization in the 19th century and urbanization
in the 20th, on the poor, women, and different racial and ethnic groups.
Interpretive: because it proposes that "to separate disembodied ways of knowing from embodied
ones, assigning an epistemologically privileged status to the former" is incorrect.

https://www.thegreenfuse.org/harris/notions-of-ek.htm

Feminism
To activist research and practice in an effort to achieve equality for women (Hesse-Biber & Yaiser,
2003; Landrine, 1995; Leatherby, 2003; Potter, 2004). In some quarters of feminism the research
focus is on the topics to be studied. Gender equity, programs of empowerment, and similar topics
are championed.

Sandra Harding (1987) posed the question, "Is there a distinctive method of inquiry?" She then
answered the question by identifying ways a feminist researcher can transform methodology:
Additive approaches.
Women's contributions.
Victimologies.
Women's experiences guide the development of research
Research for women.
The subjective objective.

The same is true of the work of Fonow and Cook (1991).