User talk:SteRos7/sandbox/Approaches to Knowledge/Seminar 1/Evidence

Evidence in Sociology
This section really interests me because it deals with the issues that sociology faces in the strength of its evidence. I think it's worth talking more about how different disciplines demand different standards of evidence, because what constitutes evidence and what evidence is possible to obtain differs from discipline to discipline; and how this doesn't affect sociology's validity as a discipline. It's something I think I'll be adding to my section on history too. 22:02, 26 October 2020 (UTC)Pacific23

Evidence in Theology
In your sentence discussing how extrabiblical evidence can be used to complement scriptural evidence, do you think it might be helpful to add that historical and archaological evidence can also contradict or undermine claims and narratives within religous scriptures? Or perhaps to change the example of claims that these can help to justify, simply because I am not sure there are instances where archaological or historical evidence have been used to justify the claim that 'God speaks only truth', simply because it is not within their disciplinary boundaries to examine those claims. What do you think? I hope my idea makes sense... Xrcaatnp (discuss • contribs) 14:15, 31 October 2020 (UTC)

Re: Evidence in Economics
With regard to economics, it is extremely hard to conduct experiments that can model the workings of the economy. Furthermore, humans are not rational, which explains why many economic theories don't hold (e.g. Veblen goods) and hence economists have to create new "rules" to explain these deviations. A lot of economic theories also has a "ceteris paribus" assumption - i.e. assuming everything else stays constant. However, in reality, it is rare that only one factor changes while everything else stays constant. This impacts the utility of economics. Economics is useful for trying to explain why a particular decision was made (e.g. game theory), but might not be useful in forecasting future decisions. Evidence in economics also fall victim to the flaws of experiments in social science.