Our courses: Explanatory models in social sciences

The objective of the course is to introduce the students to the field of contemporary sociology and to address two mutually related issues:
(a) what are the main models of explanations in social sciences?
(b) what kind of empirical data are used within different explanatory approaches? 
Many researchers in the methodology and philosophy of science argue that the decades of discussions about the internal logic and methods of social sciences are grounded in different strategies and models of theoretical explanations. The course considers all main explanatory models in sociology, including positivist, behaviorist, interpretative, ethnomethodological, functional and structural approaches to explanation of social structure. We analyze the impact of the differences between the models on the methods that are used, on the interpretation of the empirical data and on the criteria used to assess different theories. The ‘field input’ for the analysis of these meta-differences are the discussions on the methodology of the social sciences, from the classic distinction between ‘understanding’ and ‘explanation’ to the relatively recent discussions of applicability of the rationality and uncertainty principles to the analysis of human action. The course relies on numerous empirical case studies involving various research methods and explanatory models.