[Note: We didn't get to all these points here, but I thought I'll keep the outline pretty much intact. Feel free to ask me about anything that interests you but that I didn't cover sufficiently.]

1 Phenomena in Social Psychology

1.1 "Tables of contents"

1.2 Levels of analysis (areas and questions in psychology)
The realization that different phenomena require different explanations and that redutions to the more "basic" level (cognitive, neurophysiological, physical, etc.) are often meaningless because they don't answer the questions that are being asked. (This fit beteween questions and answers, which characterizes meaningful explanations, will come up again in Lecture 3.)

1.3 Common sense and (social) psychology
There is wide-spread disdain for common-sense concepts and, conversely, a desire to "replace ordinary concepts with more precise ones." But if the phenomena to be explained are described in those ordinary concepts, then "scientific" concepts and findings will either have to be back-translated into the ordinary concepts (which doesn't always happen) or will remain obtuse. (In Lecture 6 I will be talk about the role of commons sense as a conceptual framework that guides social perception and action.)

2 Psychology as Science

2.1 Is psychology a cultural evolution of 'theory of mind'?

b>2.2 Psychology is a young science. What are its parents?
Aristotle was one of the earliest scholar of "the soul" (in De Anima); Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Smith all contributed early ideas to psychology as a science.

2.3 Assumptions of causality and lawfulness
Once the mind was seen akin to the body, the principle assumption of science (phenomena obey casual mechanisms) could be applied.

2.4 What is a science anyway? Vienna Circle and Popper
The "demarcation problem": what is science, what is metaphysics? Criteria of "verifiability" (rejected because it rules out general laws and abstract concepts) and "falsifiability." Today science is best described as a commuity-accepted method of systematic exploration and backing up of one's claims. The specific methods, of course, differ by topic and community (e.g., historians vs. microphysicists).

3 Theories

3.1 The high-status feature of science

3.2 Theory examples from social psychology and some of their features
(See Lecture 2)

3.3 General (ideal) features of theories
generalizations over entities ("All-sentences"); explicit assumptions (axioms, postulates); reference to "unobservables";

3.4 Functions of theories
summary, redescription of phenomena in new conceptualization; explanation, prediction

3.5 Verification and falsification

4 Explanation and Prediction

4.1 The Hempel-Oppenheim scheme Also called the deductive-nomological model of explanation (see Little). I referred to it when explicating Meehl's concern about psychology relying too much on auxiliary hypotheses and therefore never actually falsifying theories.
4.2 Relations between explanation and prediction
4.3 Overdetermination and the "alternative explanation" game