Villa

UNIT 1: THE STUDY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCE

What is social science?

Social science: the systematic study of human behavior and societies. (Psychology/Economies and Business/Sociology)

Compare society many years ago and now

How do you perceive the social reality in El Salvador?

Which are the elements that help the development of the social reality?

Reality is the state of things asthey actually exist, rather than as they may appear or might be imagined. Reality includes everything that is and has been, whether or not it is observable or comprehensible. Not influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudice; based on facts; existing independent of thought or observation.

Reality is not the same for everyone.

There are different levels of conception of thereality.

1. Subjective Reality (SR): existing in the mind, subjective reality is an integrated belief system where consciousness and awareness are primary.  They are the container in which everything else exists. (belief in God/classroom beautiful/excellent school/boy-girlfriend)

(It’s the perspective that your true identity is the dreamer having the dream, so you are the conscious containerin which the entire dream world takes place.  Your body-mind is your avatar in the dream world, the character that gives you a first-person perspective as you interact with the contents of your own consciousness.  But that avatar is no more you than any other character in the dream world.  This perspective is also not objectively falsifiable, so it cannot be proven wrong.  However, I find it a veryrich and empowering way to interact with the dream world of reality on multiple levels.)

2. Objective Reality (OR) Objective reality is whatever remains true whether you believe in it or not. 

It’s the perspective that you’re the character in the dream world, and the dream world is solid, real, and objective. An OR person wouldn’t normally think of the physical world as a dream at all —they accept the (socially conditioned) notion that the dream world is reality itself.  The objective world itself is seen as the basis for knowledge.  Note that there can be no proof whatsoever that this is how reality actually works; it’s one giant unprovable assumption.  It’s also not falsifiable.



Philosophers, mathematicians, and others ancient and modern suchas Aristotle, Plato, Frege, Wittgenstein, Russell etc., have made a distinction between thought corresponding to reality, coherent abstractions, and that which cannot even be rationally thought. By contrast existence is often restricted solely to that which has physical existence or has a direct basis in it in the way that thoughts do in the brain.

Reality is often contrasted with what is imaginary, delusional, (only) inthe mind, dreams, what is abstract, what is false, or what is fictional. The truth refers to what is real, while falsity refers to what is not. Fictions are considered not real.

A common colloquial usage would have reality mean "perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes toward reality," as in "My reality is not your reality." This is often used just as a colloquialism indicating that the parties to aconversation agree, or should agree, not to quibble over deeply different conceptions of what is real. For example, in a religious discussion between friends, one might say (attempting humor), "You might disagree, but in my reality, everyone goes to heaven."

Reality can be defined in a way that links it to world views or parts of them (conceptual frameworks): Reality is the totality of all things,structures (actual and conceptual), events (past and present) and phenomena, whether observable or not. It is what a world view (whether it be based on individual or shared human experience) ultimately attempts to describe or map.

Certain ideas from physics, philosophy, sociology, literary criticism, and other fields shape various theories of reality. One such belief is that there simply...