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Changing Perspectives through Life

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Hello. I need assistance to write an essay answering the following questions:

1-What is your personal philosophy on changes that occur throughout early, middle, and late adulthood?
2-How do you perceive changes in activities, relationships, health, and mental outlook?
3-Are your views based on experience and/or observation?

Cite all references you use.

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Solution Summary

The solution is an extensive explanation of how the way we percieve the world changes throughout life as we gain experience, skills and knowledge. Using sociology, philosophy and the sciences, it explains socialization and how it shapes our characters and personas over time. The solution explains situatedness and man's capacity to learn and change for the purpose of survival, adaptation and development. References are provided as well as a word version of the solution for easy printing. (Total Word Count: 2,621)

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Dear Student,
My initial intention was to create a concise & short answer for all the wuestions you posted. However I have come to create a comphesive solution using combining sociology & the influence of psychology & philosophy to explain the concepts & answer the questions you presented above and more. I hope these will be of help to you. The solution is written in the APA format. The third part is an explaination of my own personal philosophy but I am sure you will be able to model your own from mine. Attached is the word format.

Perspectives, or how one views life is dynamic. There are constants within these perspectives that are brought on by genetics that Laplace refers to as 'determinism' (1817). He argues that what we are, how we are and how reality is already determined by past events influences the social world because it is an open system. Unlike in a laboratory experiment where all the variables are accounted for and can therefore be controlled by scientists conducting it (hence, the title 'closed systems'), the social world and all the variables in it affecting agents, agency & social structures cannot fully be accounted for. Social science is an 'open science'. The social sciences were arrived at this juncture through a long and painful growth process that saw a lot of paradigm shifts. Remember that back in the day of Immanuel Kant, the natural sciences and the social sciences were approached with similar methods. Scientists had already come to understand that the use of logic, reason and observation will help one arrive at the truth. Even then, while it was truly revolutionary to shift from believing that the truth about life is dictated by the supernatural & the divine to the use of logic and reason, scientists, thinkers & philosophers still had a long way to go. Back then, all social and natural scientists (biologists, chemists, and mathematicians) wanted to create universal scientific laws like Newton's Theory of Gravity. When we say universal it means applicable across the board. This is true in the natural sciences in most cases but not in the social sciences. This is because social scientists are subject to the rules of society also and it is very difficult to remove one's self from the study - there is no purity, studies are, while objective with very convincing results, not always applicable to all members of society in all situations. That's why the social sciences use perspectives and philosophies to guide any study that is undertaken. Within philosophies, a form of critical inquiry, the logic system there provides a form of research-structure that makes inquiries logical and grounded. Also, the sciences, both natural and social go through what Thomas Kuhn refers to as paradigm shift.
A paradigm is a school of thought (realists, pragmatists, post-modernists, classical) followed by members. There comes a point that this school of thought cannot explain how things are anymore in the face of insurmountable evidence that the science followed cannot make sense of. A great example would be Newtonian Physics once more. During the time period of Newton, his physics broke new grounds. It was actually used by Einstein and all the mathematicians and physicists that came after Newton to develop our understanding of Math & the physical world. But it came to a point that Einstein found Newton's linear physics lacking, it cannot explain the behaviour of light and energy. Thus, it hit a crisis and a paradigm shift happened. Einstein's quantum physics replaced Newton's as the new standard.

Explaining Changes in Outlook & through Life Stages

I am explaining these to you because human beings from childhood to adulthood experience their own 'paradigm shifts'. As experience gives them a new view of how things actually are, how they perceived the world in the past changes. Socialization is the process by which human beings are endowed with the necessary social and cultural skills to survive in society. At infancy and childhood these are honed at home and in school. With the physiological changes of puberty socialization is partly driven by changes in needs and wants as ...

Solution provided by:
Xenia Rochelle Jones, MA, PhD (IP)
Education
  • MPhil/PhD (IP), Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
  • MA, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
  • Certificate, Geva Ulpan (via Universita Tel Aviv)
  • BA, University of the Philippines
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