Social Science Postman Summary

Postman, in his essay, talks about how social science has been misinterpreted for years by being mistaken as a form of science when in fact it isn’t. Countless Sociologist claim that the job they perform is science due to the fact that, that’s what society has always claimed social science to be; therefore they may truly believe that it is a form of science. Others say it’s a science for the simple fact that they relish in idea of being associated to the word “science”. They feel that it makes them more important; even if they do in fact see why it isn’t. Postman argues that human behavior and our decision making can’t be called science, but simply story-telling. He uses the laws of science, being empirical, mathematics and the experiments …show more content…
Postman argues that their arguments are invalid because being empirical and doing math doesn’t automatically makes you a scientist, if that were true, everyone would be a scientist. He argues that everyone observes things before making an assumption (everyone but sociopaths) so that makes everyone empirical. His example was him, assuming that he enjoys writing essays. His observation to his assumption was the fact that he wrote the one he had previously written and the fact that he had a whole journal full of essays. When it came to math Postman argued that just like being empirical, everyone performs math. He used children and detectives as examples of different form of using math, how children like to count their toes and fingers and how detectives count the numbers of crimes committed. These things do not make any of them scientist. There is a clear difference from the children’s and detectives use of math and scientist use of math. It’s the same when it comes to sociologist and actual scientist. Actual scientist use math to help uncover the structure of nature, he states, while sociologist use math to give some precision to his or her ideas. That does not make sociologist