| Field of Study: | Political Science and Government, General
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| Description: | The primary purpose of the Department of Political Science is to provide the officer cadets of the Royal Military College of Canada with the best possible university-level education in political science. This education must benefit first and foremost the students themselves and, as a direct consequence, the professional development of the future officers of the Canadian Forces. The quality of this education must be such that the doors of every graduate school will be opened to the best of these students.
Social scientists seek to understand and to analyse human behaviour. In their study of society they make both normative and positive statements. Normative statements concern what one believes ought to be. They are based on value judgements related to philosophical, cultural and religious systems. Positive statements, on the other hand, are about matters of fact. They are testable statements and can be proved by empirical evidence. Successfully predicting the behaviour of a large group of people, for example, is made possible by the statistical "law" of large numbers, which asserts that irregularities in individual behaviour tend to cancel each other out and regularities tend to show up in repeated observations.
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