Page 84 - Sociology and You

54 Unit 1 Sociological Perspectives
Another Time
Seventeenth-century Europe was an exciting place for those interested in using scientific methods in the search for truth. Copernicus was an as- tronomer who held that the sun was at the center of the solar system. Traditional belief at the time placed the earth at the center. Galileo sought to replace traditional myths with new knowledge based on reason and observation. This is one es- sential aspect of the scientific method.
In 1609, . . . Galileo turned his recently con- structed telescope to the heavens, and through his startling observations made available to astron-
omy the first qualitatively new evidence it had known since the ancients. And each of his observa- tions—the craters and mountains on the surface of the Moon, the moving spots on the Sun, the four moons revolving around Jupiter, the phases of Venus, the “unbelievably” numerous individual stars
of the Milky Way— was interpreted by Galileo as powerful evidence in favor of the Copernican he- liocentric [sun-cen- tered] theory.
. . . Many indi- viduals not previ-
between lower
spurious correlation—an apparent relationship between two variables that is actually caused by a third variable affecting both of the other variables. Thus, before we can predict that a causal relationship exists between church attendance and delinquency, we need to take other factors into consideration. In this instance, the age variable reveals that the relationship between church attendance and delinquency is not a causal one. Finding hidden causes and exposing spurious correlations is one of the greatest challenges in scientific research.
❖ Standard 3: A change in the independent variable must occur before a change in the dependent variable can occur. This means that the cause must occur before the effect. Do people stop attending church before they become delinquents? Or does delinquent behavior occur before people stop attending church? Or do these variables appear at the same time? Even if age was not a factor in this correlation and no other factor could be found, causality between these two variables still could not be established since it cannot be determined which occurs first.
Reason and Science
ously involved in scientific studies now took up the telescope and saw for themselves the nature of the new Copernican universe. Astronomy, by virtue of the telescope and Galileo’s compelling writings, became of vital interest to more than specialists. Successive generations of late Renaissance and post-Renaissance Europeans, in- creasingly willing to doubt the absolute authority of traditional doctrines both ancient and ecclesias- tical, were finding the Copernican theory not only plausible but liberating. A new celestial world was opening up to the Western mind, just as a new ter- restrial world was being opened by the global ex- plorers.
Source: Excerpted from The Passion of the Western Mind. Copyright, © 1993 by Richard Tarnas. Reprinted by permission of Ballantine Books, a Division of Random House, Inc.
Thinking It Over
1. Can you analyze two important effects that the scientific revolution fueled by Galileo has had on individual behavior in the West?
2. How did Galileo employ the sociological imagination in his work?
church attendance and delinquency is known as a
spurious correlation
a relationship between two variables that is actually caused by a third factor