Talk:Self-fulfilling prophecy/Archives/2020

Self-defilling
Many a self fulfilling prophecies end up in a disaster e.g. the tulip mania. Or if the estimate is, that there will be an economical crash due to COVID-19. If many politicians believe that this is correct and spend money to stimulate the economy, the result could be that the estimated economical downturn is prevented. Could this be called "self-defilling"? Zukunft (talk) 13:24, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Merton
Merton, though towering force in the field, was not the father of sociology. Ibn Khaldun, Comte, Weber, Ferguson, Durkheim and other luminaries in the field preceded him. Even simplewikipedia's short article on sociology names a number of sociologists before Merton. Sociology was taught as a subject in 1890, and a department of sociology was founded in 1904, six years before Merton was born. I am not going to change the entry, though, because of a combination o fWikipedia policy and the Internet's nature. To wit, Wikipedia relies on secondary sources, citing them even if wrong unless there is citable material to contradict the citation; the other point is that the source for labeling Merton the father of sociology is a site that I can't enter because it apparently requires one to be affiliated with the host university. Calling him the father of the sociology of science, on the other hand, would be warranted. Whether that would be relevant to this particular article is something for editors to decide.Kdammers (talk) 03:58, 29 August 2020 (UTC)