Online research in philosophy

This paper combines a phenomenological account of the types of causal transaction found in social reality with a critique of two theories, one structuralist and one Marxist, that contravene it. Part I argues that there are three types of causal transaction in social life in addition to physical causal transactions: people bringing about states of affairs by acting, states of affairs bringing about actions by inducing responses, and entities and states of affairs bringing about what makes sense to people to (...) do by making certain factors determine this. It is also contended that social formations and structures cause actions and other social formations/structures only by way of participating in these types of transaction. The conditions under which this occurs are discussed. Part II criticizes Peter Blau's account of structural effects and Jean?Paul Sartre's version of a materialist theory of history, two theories that either advocate or require causal transactions between social structures/ formations which do not reduce to transactions of the types described in Part I. The paper concludes by suggesting that social entities that make actions possible do not thereby cause them. (shrink)

Critics of the erotetic model of explanation question its ability to discriminate significant from spurious explanations. One response to these criticisms has been to impose contextual restrictions on a case-by-case basis. In this article, the author argues that these approaches have overestimated the role of interests at the expense of other contextual aspects characteristic of social-scientific explanation. For this reason, he shows how procedures of measuring occupational status and social mobility affected different aspects of one explanation that Peter (...) class='Hi'>Blau and Otis Dudley <span class='Hi'>Duncan</span> offered in their sociological classic, The American Occupational Structure . He uses the findings from this case study to meet objections to the erotetic model. Key Words: explanation • social science • erotetic • why-question • context. (shrink)

Die Reihe formaler Sprachen, die im Verständnis von M.J. Cresswell "sinnvoll" als Modelle für natüriiche Sprachen anzusehen sind und die dabei auch semantische Vagheiten zu erfassen gestatten, nämlich die dreiwertige Logik (U. Blau), die Superbewertung (B.C. van Fraassen, K. Fine, M. Pinkal, J. Ballweg) und die unscharfe Logik (L.A. Zadeh), legt nahe, daß bei der Sprachanalyse Zadehs "Prinzip der Inkompatibilität" gilt: Hohe Präzision ist inkompatibel mit hoher Komplexität. Je komplexer man das Vagheitsproblem angeht, desto verschwommener wird der benutzbare Geltungswert. (...) Zudem wird die Sprachanalyse auf Empirie verwiesen: Die Superbewertung erfordert eine Beschreibung von Kontexten, die unscharfe Logik eine sprachempirische Untersuchung aller Geltungswerte. (shrink)