Philosophy of Social Science > Philosophy of Sociology

Philosophy of Sociology

Edited by Nelson Englert-Yang (University of Arizona)
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Summary

The Philosophy of Sociology refers to the use of philosophical thought to critique or clarify the discipline of sociology in either its academic form or intellectual content. With regards to the academic form of sociology, there is philosophical questioning of (1) the coherence of a discipline bound by a theory of society and its proper delineation from other historically related fields (e.g. economics, anthropology); (2) applications of the demarcation problem in philosophy of science — whether sociology yields scientific knowledge, or whether it should be oriented towards doing so. With regards to the intellectual content of sociology, various lines of philosophical thought (e.g. epistemological, ontological, ethical) are used in the construction, interpretation, and modification of conceptual, theoretical, and methodological frameworks central to sociology. Predominant issues of concern among philosophers who assess the content of sociology include, thematically, notions of modernity, culture, collective-intentionality, social structures and practices, and forms of social reasoning. The philosophical study of sociology is reciprocated by and closely linked with the sociological study of a central philosophical concept, knowledge. Here sociologists address the impact of social relations, processes, and institutions on knowledge, both in the generic sense ('Sociology of Knowledge') and in the scientific sense ('Sociology of Science'). Understanding social influences on knowledge in either of these senses may generally enrich understanding of knowledge-claims or more specifically inform solutions to problems of delineation and demarcation.
Key works Frisby & Sayer 1986 reviews the dependence of sociology's development on theories of society while Urry 2000 argues for the discipline to move beyond such dependence. Gieryn 1983 argues that the boundaries of scientific status for disciplines (incl. sociology) are fluid while Collins 1989 defends sociological knowledge as a candidate for science. Philosophical inquiry into core sociological concepts is ubiquitous; systematic works worth highlighting are Sewell Jr 2005 (pp. 152-174) on culture, Reich 2010 on intersubjectivity, and Turner et al 1990 on modernity and post-modernity. 
Introductions Turner's introduction to Turner & Risjord 2006 (pp. 3-69)  illustrates some main ways sociology has been implicated in philosophical discussion from the time of its founding. For introductory analysis of important concepts in sociology, I recommend relevant installments of the Routledge 'Key ideas in Sociology' series (e.g. Jenkins 2014 on social identity,  Field 2008 on social capital, or Jenks 2005 on culture).
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Sociology of Science* (4,004)
Sociology of Knowledge* (421)
Philosophy of Sociology, Misc (797)
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  1. Citizenship as Accumulation by Dispossession: The Paradox of Settler Colonial Citizenship.Areej Sabbagh-Khoury - 2022 - Sociological Theory 40 (2):151-178.
    This article extends critical trends of citizenship studies and the theory of accumulation by dispossession to articulate how settler colonial citizenship is instantiated through the active accrual of land and resources and how the emerging settler colonial citizenship entrenches both structural subjugation and resistance. The article then examines the reformation of the boundaries of citizenship through indigenous agency. I do so through examining the Palestinian citizens in Israel, specifically centering the Internally Displaced Persons—Palestinians who received Israeli citizenship even as they (...)
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  2. How Can Theories Represent Social Phenomena?Jan A. Fuhse - 2022 - Sociological Theory 40 (2):99-123.
    Discussions in sociological theory often focus on ontological questions on the nature of social reality. Against the underlying epistemological realism, I argue for a constructivist notion of theory: Theories are webs of concepts that we use to guide empirical observations and to make sense of them. We cannot know the real features of the social world, only what our theoretical perspectives make us see. Theories therefore represent social phenomena by highlighting certain features and relating them in a logical system. In (...)
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  3. Dueling with Dual-Process Models: Cognition, Creativity, and Context.Gordon Brett - 2022 - Sociological Theory 40 (2):179-201.
    Sociologists increasingly draw on dual-process models of cognition to account for the ways context, cognition, and action interrelate. Drawing from 40 interviews with improvisers and observations from improvisational theater, I find that dual-process model scholarship is limited in three respects: It does not consider how cognition operates in situations where order and disruption are concurrent, it fails to realize there is interindividual variation in cognitive processing, and it underestimates the creativity emerging through automatic processes. Interactions in improv contain elements of (...)
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  4. Chance, Orientation, and Interpretation: Max Weber’s Neglected Probabilism and the Future of Social Theory.Michael Strand & Omar Lizardo - 2022 - Sociological Theory 40 (2):124-150.
    The image of Max Weber as an “interpretivist” cultural theorist of webs of significance that people use to cope with a meaningless world reigns largely unquestioned today. This article presents a different image of Weber’s sociology, where meaning does not transport actors over an abyss of meaninglessness but rather helps them navigate a world of Chance. Retrieving this concept from Weber’s late writings, we argue that the fundamental basis of the orders sociologists seek to understand is not chaos. Action is (...)
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  5. A Sociological Perspective on the Experience of Contention.Johan Gøtzsche-Astrup - forthcoming - Sociological Theory:073527512210971.
    Contention in the form of protests, riots, and direct action is a central political practice in contemporary democracies. It is also a staple of sociological analysis, after slowly crystallizing as a distinct object of analysis from the 1970s onward. Lately, however, it has become unclear what this distinctiveness consists of and how it may help guide studies of contention: What distinguishes contention from other practices? I argue that contention can be seen as an ontologically distinctive experience. What sets this experience (...)
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  6. On the Very Idea of Symbolic Capital? Clarifying an Anthropologist’s Objection.Terence Rajivan Edward - manuscript
    Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory relies on concepts of four kinds of capital: economic, social, cultural, and symbolic. The anthropologist Pnina Werbner raises the issue of whether the concept of symbolic capital faces a paradox, because within some social groups one can only gain such capital by denying its value. There is a question of how best to clarify the paradox and I offer a clarification.
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  7. Aesthetic Style: How Material Objects Structure an Institutional Field.Gary J. Adler, Daniel DellaPosta & Jane Lankes - 2022 - Sociological Theory 40 (1):51-81.
    How does material culture matter for institutions? Material objects are increasingly prominent in sociological research, but current studies offer limited insight for how material objects matter to institutional processes. We build on sociological insights to theorize aesthetic style, a shared pattern of material object presence and usage among a cluster of organizations in an institutional field. We use formal relational methods and a survey of material objects from religious congregations to uncover the aesthetic styles that are part of the “logics (...)
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  8. Inequality Without Groups: Contemporary Theories of Categories, Intersectional Typicality, and the Disaggregation of Difference.Ellis P. Monk - 2022 - Sociological Theory 40 (1):3-27.
    The study of social inequality and stratification has long been at the core of sociology and the social sciences. In this article, I argue that certain tendencies have become entrenched in our dominant paradigm that leave many researchers pursuing coarse-grained analyses of how difference relates to inequality. Centrally, despite the importance of categories and categorization for how researchers study social inequality, contemporary theories of categories are poorly integrated into conventional research. I contend that the widespread and often unquestioned use of (...)
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  9. Can Habitus Explain Individual Particularities? Critically Appreciating the Operationalization of Relational Logic in Field Theory.Sourabh Singh - 2022 - Sociological Theory 40 (1):28-50.
    Bourdieu’s concept of habitus claims to solve the problem of the individual/society duality. However, the concept of habitus appears to be inadequate to explain the idiosyncratic features of individual field actors’ practices. In this article, I argue that to explain the particularity of individual habitus, we must appreciate the operationalization of relational logic in field theory. I further argue that individuals learn to prediscursively identify certain types of practices as meaningful for a given field position because of their embodied experiences (...)
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Philosophy of Sociology, Misc
  1. Bourdieu’s Language and Symbolic Power.Irfan Ajvazi - manuscript
    The concept of symbolic power was first introduced by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to account for the tacit, almost unconscious modes of cultural/social domination occurring within the everyday social habits maintained over conscious subjects. Symbolic power accounts for discipline used against another to confirm that individual's placement in a social hierarchy, at times in individual relations but most basically through system institutions, in particular education.
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  2. Bourdieu’s Language and Symbolic Power.Irfan Ajvazi - manuscript
    The concept of symbolic power was first introduced by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to account for the tacit, almost unconscious modes of cultural/social domination occurring within the everyday social habits maintained over conscious subjects. Symbolic power accounts for discipline used against another to confirm that individual's placement in a social hierarchy, at times in individual relations but most basically through system institutions, in particular education.
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  3. Baudrillard’s The Agony of Power.Irfan Ajvazi - manuscript
    Baudrillard insists in this book that the true aim of globalization is actually the complete liquidation of values, either by consensus or force. The West, furthermore, demands that everyone else play the same game and liquidate their own values, as well. We create a desire in these other cultures to enter history through giving them access to the global market, implementing international institutions, causing national conflicts, and so on, but the problem is that other cultures have not yet even realized (...)
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  4. Stressing the ‘Body Electric’: History and Psychology of the Techno-Ecologies of Work Stress.Jessica Pykett & Mark Paterson - forthcoming - History of the Human Sciences:095269512210817.
    This article explores histories of the science of stress and its measurement from the mid 19th century, and brings these into dialogue with critical sociological analysis of emerging responses to work stress in policy and practice. In particular, it shows how the contemporary development of biomedical and consumer devices for stress self-monitoring is based on selectively rediscovering the biological determinants and biomarkers of stress, human functioning in terms of evolutionary ecology, and the physical health impacts of stress. It considers how (...)
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  5. Reading Bruno Latour's Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory.Irfan Ajvazi - 2022 - Tesla Academy of Sciences 1:10.
    Latour does not seek any “hidden” reasons behind actions; there is not a dictionary or encyclopedia explaining the sources of the behaviors of the actors. No meta-language is in question. The analyst cannot address any invisible agency. If an agency is invisible, then it has no effect, therefore it is not an agency. If an analyst says: “No one mentions it. For Latour, agency is not limited to human beings, but objects should also be counted as agents which is one (...)
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  6. The Sociology of Personal Identification.Jordan Brensinger & Gil Eyal - 2021 - Sociological Theory 39 (4):265-292.
    Systems drawing on databases of personal information increasingly shape life experiences and outcomes across a range of settings, from consumer credit and policing to immigration, health, and employment. How do these systems identify and reidentify individuals as the same unique persons and differentiate them from others? This article advances a general sociological theory of personal identification that extends and improves earlier work by theorists like Goffman, Mauss, Foucault, and Deleuze. Drawing on examples from an original ethnographic study of identity theft (...)
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  7. Familiarity as a Practical Sense of Place.Maxime Felder - 2021 - Sociological Theory 39 (3):180-199.
    Familiarity is an elusive concept, capturing what we know intimately and what we only recognize from having seen before. This article aims to disambiguate these interpretations by proposing a sociological conceptualization of familiarity as a dynamic relationship to the world that develops over time and through experience and that allows one to progressively disattend from what appears as “usual.” Focusing on how urban environments and their human entities become familiar and stop being familiar, I propose that familiarity be thought of (...)
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  8. Relational Segregation: A Structural View of Categorical Relations.Jeremy E. Fiel - 2021 - Sociological Theory 39 (3):153-179.
    This article builds a framework for a relational approach to segregation that emphasizes structures of interactions, transactions, and ties between and within social categories. Rather than explaining segregation with dominants imposing formal rules or homophilic people sorting themselves, I highlight segregation’s emergence amid dueling control efforts among actors with malleable categorical identities. And rather than assuming segregation necessarily fuels cycles of inequality or persecution, I identify nuanced advantages and disadvantages for different actors in social conflict. I also explore an underappreciated (...)
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  9. Sociologie fondamentale. Etude d'épistémologie.Dominique Raynaud - 2021 - Paris: Editions Matériologiques.
    Ce livre est un livre d’épistémologie de la sociologie. L’objectif est d’appliquer des méthodes analytiques pour clarifier le vocabulaire, expliciter des relations non-apparentes entre concepts, dégager la portée d’une méthode, ou souligner les incohérences d’un programme de recherche. Les questions épineuses ne sont pas écartéees: Comment clarifier des notions confuses? Peut-on mathématiser les concepts sociologiques? Peut-on pratiquer la sociologie comme on pratique les sciences naturelles? Quelle est la place du déterminisme? Chaque question est examinée à la fois dans sa structure (...)
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  10. Cognitive Autonomy and Methodological Individualism: The Interpretative Foundations of Social Life.Francesco Di Iorio - 2015 - Springer.
    “Di Iorio offers a new approach to Hayek’s Sensory Order, linking neuroscience to the old Verstehen tradition and to contemporary theories of self-organizing systems; this should be on the reading list of everyone who is interested in Hayek’s thought.” Barry Smith University at Buffalo, editor of The Monist “This impressive and well-researched book breaks new ground in our understanding of F.A. Hayek and of methodological individualism more generally. It shows that methodological individualism sanctions neither an atomistic view of society nor (...)
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  11. Are Theories Politically Flexible?Federico Brandmayr - 2021 - Sociological Theory 39 (2):103-125.
    Social theories are politically flexible if people use them to support opposite political claims. But is this even possible? And what kind of theories have such a property? Moving beyond epistemological debates about neutrality and value-leadenness, this article defends an empirical approach to the study of flexible and rigid political uses of social theories. I identify two main sources of flexibility: endogenous properties of theories, notably their generality, ambiguity, and neutrality, and exogenous features of the contexts in which they are (...)
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  12. The Relational Public.Paul Starr - 2021 - Sociological Theory 39 (2):57-80.
    This article sets out three ways of conceiving publics: an organic conception, the public as the body politic; an individualized conception, the public as an aggregate of individuals, grouped by social categories; and a relational conception, in which publics are defined as open-ended networks of actors linked through flows of communication, shared stories, and civic or other collective concerns. These conceptions have emerged not only through theoretical reflection but also as the result of historical and institutional developments. Building on work (...)
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  13. What is Social Hierarchy?Han van Wietmarschen - forthcoming - Noûs.
    Under which conditions are social relationships hierarchical, and under which conditions are they not? This article has three main aims. First, I will explain what this question amounts to by providing a more detailed description of the general phenomenon of social hierarchy. Second, I will provide an account of what social hierarchy is. Third, I will provide some considerations in favour of this account by discussing how it improves upon three alternative ways of thinking about social hierarchy that are sometimes (...)
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  14. On Sociological Reflexivity.Monika Krause - 2021 - Sociological Theory 39 (1):3-18.
    This article offers a critique of the self-observation of the social sciences practiced in the philosophy of the social sciences and the critique of epistemological orientations. This kind of reflection involves the curious construction of wholes under labels, which are the result of a process of “distillation” or “abstraction” of a “position” somewhat removed from actual research practices and from the concrete claims and findings that researchers produce, share, and debate. In this context, I call for more sociological forms of (...)
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  15. Three Tensions in the Theory of Racial Capitalism.Julian Go - 2021 - Sociological Theory 39 (1):38-47.
    In this essay the author assesses the relevance of scholarship on racial capitalism for sociological theory. The author highlights three tensions within the existing literature: whether “race” as opposed to other forms of difference is the primary mode of differentiation in capitalism, whether deficiencies in existing theory warrant the new concept “racial capitalism,” and whether the connection between race and capitalism is a contingent or logical necessity. Existing discussions of racial capitalism implicitly or explicitly raise these tensions, but they do (...)
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  16. Transitional Temporality.Daniel Hirschman - 2021 - Sociological Theory 39 (1):48-58.
    Sewell identified three temporalities that underlie many social scientific accounts. This article identifies a fourth: transitional temporality. This approach is inspired by Polanyi’s comparative analysis of the rate of change of economic transformation surrounding the commodification of land and labor. Following Polanyi, transitional temporality focuses not on the endpoints of social transformation nor on moments of transformation but on the potentially lengthy transitions between structures. Whereas eventful temporality equates agency with the choices made by individuals during relatively rare events, transitional (...)
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  17. What’s Hegemonic About Hegemonic Masculinity? Legitimation and Beyond.Yuchen Yang - 2020 - Sociological Theory 38 (4):318-333.
    Raewyn Connell’s theoretical concept of hegemonic masculinity has been profoundly influential in feminist sociology. Despite the rich literature inspired by her theory, conceptual ambiguities have compromised its full potential. In this article, I critique a pessimistic tendency in the interpretation and application of hegemonic masculinity, which focuses on its regressive role in reproducing/legitimating heteronormative patriarchy while overlooking its progressive potential. I propose that revisiting Antonio Gramsci’s theorization of hegemony can help us understand hegemonic masculinity by its mechanism of domination—force accompanied (...)
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  18. A Sociology of Luck.Michael Sauder - 2020 - Sociological Theory 38 (3):193-216.
    Sociology has been curiously silent about the concept of luck. The present article argues that this omission is, in fact, an oversight: An explicit and systematic engagement with luck provides a more accurate portrayal of the social world, opens potentially rich veins of empirical and theoretical inquiry, and offers a compelling alternative for challenging dominant meritocratic frames about inequality and the distribution of rewards. This article develops a framework for studying luck, first by proposing a working definition of luck, examining (...)
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  19. Are Institutions Created by Collective Acceptance?Danny Frederick - 2020 - Journal of Value Inquiry 54 (3):443-455.
    John Searle, in several articles and books, has contended that institutions incorporating status functions with deontic powers are created by collective acceptance. I argue that collective acceptance can create new status functions with deontic powers only if other status functions with deontic powers already exist, so that collective acceptance can create new institutions only if other institutions are presupposed. So, the claim that institutions depend upon collective acceptance involves a vicious infinite regress. I provide an example to show how an (...)
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  20. Race, Empire, and Epistemic Exclusion: Or the Structures of Sociological Thought.Julian Go - 2020 - Sociological Theory 38 (2):79-100.
    This essay analyzes racialized exclusions in sociology through a focus on sociology’s deep epistemic structures. These structures dictate what counts as social scientific knowledge and who can produce it. A historical analysis of their emergence and persistence reveals their connections to empire. Due to sociology’s initial emergence within the culture of American imperialism, early sociological thought embedded the culture of empire’s exclusionary logics. Sociology’s epistemic structures were inextricably racialized, contributing to exclusionary modes of thought and practice along the lines of (...)
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  21. Theorizing Region: Links to Ethnicity, Nation, and Race.John D. Skrentny - 2020 - Sociological Theory 38 (1):1-15.
    The concept of “region” is widespread in the social sciences but rarely theorized. I argue here that region is a multivalent concept similar to ethnicity, nation, and race. Building on the work of Bourdieu, Brubaker, and Griswold, I show that all four concepts can be understood as both “categories of analysis” and “categories of practice.” Moreover, all four have fundamental similarities regarding ontology and relation to space; historical sequences and relation to time; and protean boundaries that may change with social (...)
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  22. Tekemättä jättämiset vastarintana.Kaisa Kärki - 2019 - In Outi Autti & Lehtola Veli-Pekka (eds.), Hiljainen Vastarinta. Tampere, Finland: pp. 27-54.
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  23. On the Ambivalence of the Aphorism in Sociological Theory.Thomas Crosbie & Jeffrey Guhin - 2019 - Sociological Theory 37 (4):381-400.
    Sociologists have long been taken by certain pithy expressions from the founders of the discipline. We propose here both a new explanation for the endurance of these statements as well as an analysis of the power, limitations, and possibilities of aphorisms. By drawing from the critical scholarship concerned with aphorisms, we demonstrate that some of the allure of the classical sociological texts derives from their form, and particularly their reliance on the relative autonomy of the aphorism. Through examining Marx’s “opiate (...)
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  24. On Assemblages and Things: Fluidity, Stability, Causation Stories, and Formation Stories.Timothy Rutzou & Dave Elder-Vass - 2019 - Sociological Theory 37 (4):401-424.
    This article conducts a dialogue and creates a new synthesis between two of the most influential ontological discourses in the field of sociology: assemblage theory and critical realism. The former proposes a focus on difference, fluidity, and process, the latter a focus on stability and structure. Drawing on and assessing the work of Deleuze, DeLanda, and Bhaskar, we argue that social ontology must overcome the tendency to bifurcate between these two poles and instead develop an ontology more suited to explaining (...)
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  25. The Weberian Presuppositional Analytic.Eric Malczewski - 2019 - Sociological Theory 37 (4):363-380.
    This article offers an account of a conceptual framework in Max Weber’s writings offering leverage on empirical, normative, and theoretical questions. Weber relied on the notion of Voraussetzung—presupposition—across his work to distinguish the criteria of concepts of empirical phenomena, accounts of such phenomena, and conditions shaping evaluative stands among alternative courses of action. Weber also refers to Denkvoraussetzungen—presuppositions of thought—which refer to sets of fundamental principles structuring experience. Presuppositions of thought represent historically specific metaphysical and ontological orientations. Based on a (...)
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  26. Building Middle-Range Theories From Case Studies.Tuukka Kaidesoja - 2019 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 78:23-31.
    How are middle-range theories about causal mechanisms built from case studies in the social sciences? My aim is to answer this question by analyzing and improving Derek Beach and Rasmus Brun Pedersen’s account of the method of theory-building process-tracing. After having introduced the basic issues and concepts, I move on to analyze their descriptions of theory-building process-tracing. I identify some ambiguities and problems in their notions of middle-range theory and causal mechanism. In the constructive part of the paper, I provide (...)
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  27. Towards a Conceptualization of Sociomaterial Entanglement.Daniele Porello & Roberta Ferrario - 2015 - In Henning Christiansen, Isidora Stojanovic & George A. Papadopoulos (eds.), Modeling and Using Context. 9th International and Interdisciplinary Conference, Context 2015. Springer. pp. 32--46.
    In knowledge representation, socio-technical systems can be modeled as multiagent systems in which the local knowledge of each individual agent can be seen as a context. In this paper we propose formal ontologies as a means to describe the assumptions driving the construction of contexts as local theories and to enable interoperability among them. In particular, we present two alternative conceptualizations of the notion of sociomateriality (and entanglement), which is central in the recent debates on socio-technical systems in the social (...)
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  28. The Role of Imagination in Social Scientific Discovery: Why Machine Discoverers Will Need Imagination Algorithms.Michael Stuart - 2019 - In Mark Addis, Fernand Gobet & Peter Sozou (eds.), Scientific Discovery in the Social Sciences. Springer Verlag.
    When philosophers discuss the possibility of machines making scientific discoveries, they typically focus on discoveries in physics, biology, chemistry and mathematics. Observing the rapid increase of computer-use in science, however, it becomes natural to ask whether there are any scientific domains out of reach for machine discovery. For example, could machines also make discoveries in qualitative social science? Is there something about humans that makes us uniquely suited to studying humans? Is there something about machines that would bar them from (...)
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  29. Thick Concepts and Sociological Research.Gabriel Abend - 2019 - Sociological Theory 37 (3):209-233.
    I consider how to do sociological things with thick concepts, what’s the relation between thick concepts and social facts, what’s unique about thick concepts, and what’s unique about creatures in whose lives there are thick concepts.
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  30. Meaning and Modularity: The Multivalence of “Mechanism” in Sociological Explanation.Carly R. Knight & Isaac Ariail Reed - 2019 - Sociological Theory 37 (3):234-256.
    Mechanisms are ubiquitous in sociological explanation. Recent theoretical work has sought to extend mechanistic explanation further still: into cultural and interpretative analysis. Yet it is not clear that the concept of mechanism can coherently unify interpretation and causal explanation within a single explanatory framework. We note that sociological mechanistic explanation is marked by a crucial disjuncture. Specifically, we identify two conflicting mechanistic approaches: Modular mechanism models depict counterfactual dependence among independent causal chains, whereas meaningful mechanism models depict relational interdependence among (...)
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  31. Affective Societies: Key Concepts.Jan Slaby & Christian von Scheve (eds.) - 2019 - New York: Routledge.
    Affect and emotion have come to dominate discourse on social and political life in the mobile and networked societies of the early 21st century. This volume introduces a unique collection of essential concepts for theorizing and empirically investigating societies as Affective Societies. The concepts engender insights into the affective foundations of social coexistence and are indispensable to comprehend the many areas of conflict linked to emotion such as migration, political populism, or local and global inequalities. Each chapters provides historical orientation; (...)
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  32. Explanation in Action Theory and Historiography: Causal and Teleological Approaches.Gunnar Schumann (ed.) - 2019 - New York: Routledge.
    Is the appropriate form of human action explanation causal or rather teleological? While this is a central question in analytic philosophy of action, it also has implications for the question whether there are differences in principle between the methods of explanation in the sciences on the one hand and in the humanities and the social sciences on the other. The question bears on the problem of the appropriate form of explanations of past human actions, and therefore it is prominently discussed (...)
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  33. Social Types and Sociological Analysis.Charles Turner - 2019 - History of the Human Sciences 32 (3):3-23.
    Social types, or types of persons, occupy a curious place in the history of sociology. There has never been any agreement on how they should be used, or what their import is. Yet the problems surrounding their use are instructive, symptomatic of key ambivalences at the heart of the sociological enterprise. These include a tension between theories of social order that privilege the division of labour and those that focus on large-scale cultural complexes; a tension between the analysis of society (...)
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  34. Durkheim Among the Statisticians.Stephen Turner - 1996 - Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 32 (4):354-378.
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  35. Semejanzas estructurales entre la tradición de la filosofía moral y la teoría social de Durkheim.Ana Marta González - 2016 - Pensamiento 72 (274):1197-1215.
    Las primeras teorías sociológicas son deudoras de las filosofías ilustradas de la historia, las cuales aparecieron para proporcionar un marco de sentido a la acción moral, una vez que la teoría moral renunció a los compromisos metafísicos de la filosofía moral premoderna. Al tiempo que defendió la autonomía de la sociología frente a la filosofía, Durkheim le prescribió a aquélla una tarea específica: realizar una ciencia moral que atendiendo a dos rasgos con los que los hechos morales se muestra a (...)
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  36. Max Weber: Ação Social e Tipos Ideais.Emanuel Isaque Cordeiro da Silva - manuscript
    Emanuel Isaque Cordeiro da Silva E-mails: [email protected] e [email protected] WhatsApp: (82)9.8143-8399 -/- Max Weber: Ação Social e Tipos Ideais Nascido na Alemanha, em 1864. Os trabalhos de Weber estão condensados entre as duas primeiras décadas do século XX e estipulam uma nova estruturação para as Ciências Sociais. Weber, assim como outros cientistas sociais, dedicou-se a metodizar a Sociologia, não obstante, sua perspectiva sociológica diverge do pensamento de Durkheim, particularmente no que tange à transcendência do sujeito e de sua ação social. (...)
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  37. Le raisonnement expérimental en sociologie Experimental Reasoning in Sociology.Dominique Raynaud - 2019 - Philosophia Scientae 23:19-46.
    Unlike the physical sciences, sociology is frequently described as an interpretative non-experimental science. Comparative epistemology sheds new light on this claim. 1. Experimentation is not a constant character of the physical sciences; 2. Experimental hypothetical-deductive reasoning, including the test of predictions, is also practicable in sociology. The argument is developed by a detailed step-wise comparison of the prediction of light ray deviation within the Sun’s gravitational field made in 1919 (physics) and the prediction of 8% cosmopolitanism of Cambridge University between (...)
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  38. Le raisonnement expérimental en sociologie.Dominique Raynaud - forthcoming - Philosophia Scientiae.
    Au contraire des sciences physiques, la sociologie est souvent décrite comme une science interprétative et non-expérimentale. L’épistémologie apporte un éclairage nouveau sur cette position : 1) L’expérimentation n’est pas un trait constant des sciences physiques ; 2) Le raisonnement expérimental est également applicable en sociologie. L’argument est développé en comparant en détail le test de la prédiction d’une déviation des rayons lumineux dans un champ de gravitation effectué en 1919 et le test de la prédiction d’un taux de cosmopolitisme de (...)
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  39. What Was Sociology?Des Fitzgerald - 2019 - History of the Human Sciences 32 (1):121-137.
    This article is about the future of sociology, as transformations in the digital and biological sciences lay claim to the discipline’s jurisdictional hold over ‘the social’. Rather than analyse the specifics of these transformations, however, the focus of the article is on how a narrative of methodological crisis is sustained in sociology, and on how such a narrative conjures very particular disciplinary futures. Through a close reading of key texts, the article makes two claims: that a surprisingly conventional urge towards (...)
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  40. What Was Sociology?Des Fitzgerald - 2019 - History of the Human Sciences 32 (1):121-137.
    This article is about the future of sociology, as transformations in the digital and biological sciences lay claim to the discipline’s jurisdictional hold over ‘the social’. Rather than analyse the specifics of these transformations, however, the focus of the article is on how a narrative of methodological crisis is sustained in sociology, and on how such a narrative conjures very particular disciplinary futures. Through a close reading of key texts, the article makes two claims: that a surprisingly conventional urge towards (...)
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  41. Body, Habit, Custom and Labour.Shriddha Shah - 2017 - Social Change 47 (2):189-199.
    Theories in the modern age in philosophy, as well as in the discourse of the social sciences, are pervaded with the presuppositions of the dualisms of mind and world, theory and practice, private and public. These theoretical dualisms make it impossible to have an account of the interconnected nature of the experience of individuals and societies. The philosophical theoretical vocabulary to take account of the relations between these dualisms has been effaced with the legacy of Cartesian dualism. I argue that (...)
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