Science Fiction and Society

1. Epistemology is the theory of how we know what we know. (Greek episteme, "knowledge"; logos, "theory"), branch of philosophy that addresses the philosophical problems surrounding the theory of knowledge. Epistemology is concerned with the definition of knowledge and related concepts, the sources and criteria of knowledge, the kinds of knowledge possible and the degree to which each is certain, and the exact relation between the one who knows and the object known.
2. Some sociologists tend to think that the best way to study human societies is to use the methods and procedures of the physical sciences (e.g., physics, chemistry) and thus tend to emphasize quantitative methods such as statistics and computer modeling. These are often associated with:
   1. Mechanism, materialism, naturalism: Mechanism, in philosophy, is a term designating any concept according to which the universe is completely explicable in terms of mechanical processes. There is much debate and concern about the degree to which human societies can be likened to a machine. In this general sense mechanism is practically equivalent to materialism, the idea that material things and processes drive all of life. The term is often used, however, as a synonym for naturalism, the doctrine that the phenomena of nature are not regulated by divine or supernatural intelligence, but are adequately explained by the mechanical laws of chemistry and physics. In the latter sense the customary antonym of mechanism is teleology, sometimes called finalism, the doctrine that nature and creation are ordered by a divine plan and fulfill divinely appointed ends.
3. Other sociologists tend to think that human society needs to be looked at more on its own terms, because human society is based on meanings and human creativity. These sociologists are more likely to use qualitative methods, like ethnography.
4. Utilitarianism: a tradition of thought which believes that, given a chance, human individuals tend to rationally maximize pleasure and minimize pain, and that the goal of social organization should be to gain the greatest good (or pleasure) for the greatest number. Rational choice theory in sociology is a descendant of utilitarianism, as is neoclassical economic theory.

1. social structure: the forms or patterns of human association that constrain or shape behavior; the whole of human life that cannot be reduced to merely the sum of the parts. There are many different ways of understanding the character of social structure, for example:
   1. conflict theories understand social structure as a product of inevitable conflict between human groups (e.g., Marxism’s theory of the class struggle).
   2. systems or functionalist theories (e.g., Durkheim) understand social structure as an organic whole organized functionally so that balance between the different parts is maintained.
2. agency: the human capacity for individual action against social constraint.
3. social class: a social stratum whose members share similar economic and political characteristics and interests.
4. caste: a social group or class within a society based on distinctions of hereditary rank.
5. ethnicity: a social group bound together by a common language or dialect ("accent"), religion, heritage, and/or geographical place. Racial characteristics are often associated with ethnicity, particularly because they are visually easily identifiable, but most sociologists would say that there's no such thing as different "races" of human beings, because we are all too closely related genetically to be grouped into different biological categories; the idea that there are distinct races is generally thought to be the product of a confusion of ethnicity with biological difference.

1. social reproduction (contrasted with production or the manufacture of food and goods) is the process by which societies maintain themselves from generation to generation. This process involves things like family structure, peer groups, educational systems, religion, culture and most fundamentally, social identity.

1. What is the self? There are many different answers. Three common broad approaches are:
   1. Cartesian rationalism: a philosophy based on the work of Descartes, who said "I think therefore I am," which meant that the essence of the self is rational, cognitive, and immaterial.
   2. Utilitarianism: a philosophy which says that all people act out of rational self interest in order to minimize pain and maximize pleasure. The self is thus simply our wants or desires coupled to our ability to reason.
   3. Romanticism (e.g., Mary Shelley, Thoreau): expresses doubts about the values of scientific rationalism, and suggests that there is uncertainty about what makes us human (e.g., Frankenstein), hence the "self" is something that is subject to change, and perhaps "socially constructed."
2. Microsociology and phenomenological sociology: the construction of selves in everyday life
   1. focuses on everyday life; social context & interaction; matters of meaning (e.g., formal vs. informal language style).
   2. often uses a dramaturgical metaphor, i.e., it takes literally the saying that "all the world's a stage" and looks at how in a way we all get through life by "playing" a variety of learned roles, hence the focus on what Goffman calls the "Presentation of Self in Everyday life."
3. Nature vs. Nurture, theoretical debate over what portion of behavior or perception is learned and what portion an organism is born with.

1. Sex is usually used to mean biological sexual differences like reproductive organs; gender is usually used in contrast to mean aspects associated with being male or female that are created by society and culture, like the idea that pink is a feminine color or that women are naturally more intuitive than men.
2. Patriarchy, is literally, rule by the father. It most often refers to the political power and authority of males in a society, or simply the cultural and social domination of women by men. Patriarchy can also refer to the power of fathers within families. A society is considered patriarchal when men establish or inherit a social order where they dominate positions of power and authority. In early history, many Western thinkers believed that male dominance was the natural or God-given order of society. That belief began to be challenged after the 18th century, particularly with the advent of the women’s rights movement. The women’s rights movement promoted the political, social, and economic equality of women. But in the 20th century, with the rise of sentiment against feminism and the growth of religious fundamentalism, there has been a resurgence in some parts of the world of the belief that patriarchy is the natural order of society, including in the West. For example, after a new fundamentalist Muslim regime took over in Iran in 1979, women were segregated from men at social functions, barred from becoming judges or senior religious leaders, forbidden to leave the country without the permission of their husbands and required to wear the chador, a long black cloth that covers the head and body. Beginning in the 1960s, feminist thinkers began to question why sexual inequality persisted even after women had won the right to vote and had achieved legal equity. They also debated whether or not patriarchy is universal to all societies throughout history; many feminist science fiction writers have explored this question by imagining societies with very different relations between the sexes.

1. Most theorists would say that human social life has been organized in the following stages of development:
   1. the hunter-gathering stage (hunting and gathering naturally occurring food in small bands)
   2. the agricultural stage (where the majority of food comes from cultivated crops and domesticated animals, and life tends to be more settled)
   3. the feudal stage involves elaborate social hierarchies based on cast systems, agricultural economies with some market exchange, and pre-industrial, craft technologies.
   4. industrial or industrial-capitalist societies (where ever more of life is mass produced in factories, life becomes more mobile and privatized, formal contractual relations replace relations of kinship, religion, and tradition, and reliance on complex technologies becomes ever more elaborate)
   5. What's next? There is no consensus on what comes after industrial society: theories proposed include information society, postmodern society, late capitalism, communism.
2. What happens during industrialization? (a question of much interest to both sociology and science fiction)
   1. Industrial Revolution: the shift, at different times in different countries, from a traditional agriculturally based economy to one based on the mechanized production of manufactured goods in large-scale enterprises.
   2. Division of labor: The division of labor is a basic tenet of industrialization. In division of labor, each worker is assigned to a different task, or step, in the manufacturing process, and as a result, total production increases. One person performing all five steps in the manufacture of a product can make one unit in a day. Five workers, each specializing in one of the five steps, can make 10 units in the same amount of time.
   3. Impersonality of social relations: relations between people in modernized societies become increasingly abstract and impersonal. People are brought together, less by physical location or ties of kinship and tradition, and more by abstract categories like age, expertise, or profession. Communication is no longer exclusively face-to-face, and is frequently through print or other mass media.
   4. Reliance on science: rational scientific ways of thinking become more of a presence in the lives of people in modernizing societies, whether or not people always subscribe to science.
   5. Individualism: although it may not be inevitable, at least in Western developed countries, modernization has been accompanied by an increased emphasis on the uniqueness of individuals and individual freedoms, and a resistance to direct control by the state and other collectivities.
3. Is modernization good or bad?
   1. Optimists: most people see many good things in modernization, particularly the lessening of material deprivation. But some approaches more controversially see modernizing processes as the solution to most problems. Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics, tended to see modernization as an unequivocally good thing.
   2. Pessimists: there have always been some who have expressed doubts about various aspects of modernization, like Henry David Thoreau, who advocated a life of simplicity and a closeness with nature, or various religious groups like the Amish, who feel that the modern world is spiritually bereft.
   3. Marxism: Marx and Engels were very much in favor of modernization, but thought that the capitalist stage of development had some major flaws that needed to be changed by socialism. They saw technological and social progress as a product, not of individual human actions, but of the underlying "laws of motion of history." Under capitalism, however, the crises of capitalism were certain to manifest themselves in falling rates of profit, mounting hostility between workers and employers, ever more severe depressions, and the increasing immiseration of the working class. The outcome of class warfare was fated to be revolution and progress toward, first, socialism and ultimately communism. Lenin adopted the theory that, in the first stage a strong state would still be required in order to eliminate the remnants of capitalist opposition. Each person's work would be rewarded according to the value of his or her contribution. Once communism was achieved, the state, whose central purpose was class domination, would wither away, and each individual would in the utopian future be compensated according to need.
   4. Emile Durkheim: Durkheim was against socialism, and saw modernization largely as the product of the increasing division of labor in society. He worried that the collapse of traditional social bonds in modernization might lead to anomie, a sense of rootlessness and despair peculiar to the modern era.
   5. Max Weber: Weber disagreed with Marx’s prediction that capitalism would produce only chaos and misery; instead, Weber argued that modernization produced ever more "rationality" and order, sometimes at the expense of human freedom. (Weber is thought by some to have predicted the bureaucratic totalitarianism of the Soviet Union.) In particular, Weber noted the modernization was characterized by increased emphasis on making all activities efficient by ensuring that they are calculable (measurable), uniform, and predictable. Applied to social life as a whole, these trends are sometimes called social engineering. Weber worried that modern rationalization might rob humanity of higher feelings and sensitivities, and that there were inevitably irrationalities of rationalization. Modern examples of trends predicted by Weber include Fordism (an industrial strategy of shorter hours and higher wages that fosters consumerism) and the general patterns Ritzer calls "McDonaldization."

The Willing Suspension of Disbelief: all fiction is, by definition, untrue; yet part of the pleasure of good fiction is that it invites us to temporarily imagine that it is true, to temporarily allow ourselves to believe that what is happening is true. Special effects and realist detail help to create the suspension of disbelief. It's important to remember when discussing fiction that you're not talking about real people; you're talking about words on a page or pictures on a screen.

Plot: the basic sequence of events of a story. (For example, Dr. Frankenstein makes monster, rejects monster, monster seeks revenge).

Narration: the way a story is presented to the reader. (For example, explorer meets Dr. Frankenstein on the ice, who then recounts his history.)

Character: the key persons described in a story and the personality traits revealed by their words and actions.

Point of view: the place from which the reader (or viewer) learns what happens; in film the camera automatically provides a point of view. Often there is a narrator who tells the story. If the narrator is not a character in the story and is able to know more than one person in the story could know, the narrator is an omniscient narrator. Sometimes there is a focal character around whom events happen, like Chase in Neuromancer.

Style: the general word for the tone, figures of speech, and other techniques through which a story is narrated. Style can be formal, for example, like Shelley's Frankenstein, or informal, like Gibson's Neuromancer.