Read and Understand!

(Lecture1)

Dominant Approaches and Ideas in Social Science

1. Structuralism
“Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another,
not words.”
― Rumi
- Based on the Philosophy “never complicate things without simple ideas”
- It is considered as a school of thought in Psychology, which emphasizes that each concept
began in a simple structure; e.g. emotions such as guilt, anger and fear started from sadness
- It is an important approach in Linguistics, structures of symbols and signs were made to
form words or language
- A culture will not be considered as a whole without each cultural trait- simplest unit of
structure of culture.
- An idea or basic concept which can be expounded into different meanings.
- By means of this approach, epistemology or the origin of human life or anything in this
world can be derived
- “one structure missing… the whole structure won’t be completed”
- Ferdinand De Saussure, Claude Levi Strauss

2. Functionalism
“The part an actor played on stage was once written on a separate roll of
paper.
-Talcott Parsons”

- Presence of inputs and outputs

- Accounts the idea of “multiple realizability”
- Based on the Theory of the mind and behaviourism
- A structure has its function… which is dependent on the acts of situations and realities
- People create and do things because of opinions which were put into action
- Value the concept of structure because of its given function
- Mental and Moral

Prepared by

CATHERINE A. GALANG-DANGANAN, Ph.D