This introduction to the philosophy of socialscience provides an original conception of the task and nature of social inquiry. Peter Manicas discusses the role of causality seen in the physical sciences and offers a reassessment of the problem of explanation from a realist perspective. He argues that the fundamental goal of theory in both the natural and social sciences is not, contrary to widespread opinion, prediction and control, or the explanation of events. Instead, theory aims (...) to provide an understanding of the processes which, together, produce the contingent outcomes of experience. Offering a host of concrete illustrations and examples of critical ideas and issues, this accessible book will be of interest to students of the philosophy of socialscience, and social scientists from a range of disciplines. (shrink)
The second edition of Andrew Skinner's essays has been updated to take account of his latest thinking on Adam Smith's system of social and moral science and his experience of teaching Smith to a student audience. The material from the first edition has been extensively rewritten in the light of recent scholarship, and four new essays have been included. Each essay can be read as a self-contained unit, supported by a full bibliography and notes; the book as a (...) whole expounds a single coherent argument which demonstrates how Smith's works are inter-related. (shrink)
Jeremy Bentham was an ardent secularist convinced that society could be sustained without the support of religious institutions or beliefs. This is writ large in the commonly neglected books on religion he wrote and published during the last twenty-five years of his life. However his earliest writings on the subject date from the 1770s, when as a young man he first embarked on his calling as a legal theorist and social reformer. From that time on, religion was never far (...) from the centre of his thoughts. In Secular Utilitarianism, James Crimmins illustrates the nature, extent, and depth of Jeremy Bentham's concern with religion, from his Oxford days of first doubts to the middle years of quiet unbelief, and finally, the zealous atheism and secularism of his later life. Dr Crimmins provides an interpretation of Bentham's thought in which his religious views, hitherto of little interest to Bentham scholars, are shown to be integral: on the one hand intimately associated with the metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological principles which gave shape to his system as a whole, and on the other central to the development of his entirely secular view of society. (shrink)
Mary Hobgood rightly asserts the significance of socialscience analysis for theological ethics ; however, her argument that most injustice in the modern world is rooted in systemic flaws of global capitalism subverts her hope that governmental welfare policies can alleviate poverty and her support for the U.S. Catholic bishops' goals for welfare policies. On the other hand, if Hobgood's account of poverty and welfare exaggerates the role of systemic capitalism, as I contend it does, she has good (...) reason to explore connections with the strands of social and moral thought within what she calls the dominant discourse. (shrink)
A realist, powers‐based metaphysics is very much on the table in contemporary metaphysics, and is beginning to take hold in philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. On this picture, causality is (roughly) a matter of the powers that things have to effect change(s) in other things. The realist view is at odds with every version of Humeanism, according to all of which causation is not, in the end, about the exercise of powers, but rather, in one way or (...) another, about regular sequences. The chapter has two parts. In the first part the chapter considers how it is that analytic philosophers of socialscience have been able thus far to side‐step the critique of Humeanism. In the second part, the chapter considers how analytic philosophy of socialscience might look different, were Humeanism no longer to be its tacit metaphysics. (shrink)
Making SocialScience Matter presents an exciting new approach to the social and behavioral sciences including theoretical argument, methodological guidelines, and examples of practical application. Why has socialscience failed in attempts to emulate natural science and produce normal theory? Bent Flyvbjerg argues that the strength of social sciences lies in its rich, reflexive analysis of values and power, essential to the social and economic development of any society. Richly informed, powerfully argued, (...) and clearly written, this book opens up a new future for the social sciences. Its empowering message will make it required reading for students and academics across the social and behavioral sciences. (shrink)
The approach of structuralism came to philosophy from socialscience. It was also in socialscience where, in 1950–1970s, in the form of the French structuralism, the approach gained its widest recognition. Since then, however, the approach fell out of favour in socialscience. Recently, structuralism is gaining currency in the philosophy of mathematics. After ascertaining that the two structuralisms indeed share a common core, the question stands whether general structuralism could not find its (...) way back into socialscience. The nature of the major objections raised against French structuralism – concerning its alleged ahistoricism, methodological holism and universalism – are reconsidered. While admittedly grounded as far as French structuralism is concerned, these objections do not affect general structuralism as such. The fate of French structuralism thus does not seem to preclude the return of general structuralism into socialscience, rather, it provides some hints where the difficulties may lie. (shrink)
There appears to be a widespread belief that the social sciences during the 1950s and 1960s can be characterized by an almost unquestioned faith in a positivist philosophy of science. In contrast, the article shows that even within the narrower segment of Cold War socialscience, positivism was not an unquestioned doctrine blindly followed by everybody, but that quite divergent views coexisted. The article analyses two ‘techniques of prospection’, the Delphi technique and political gaming, from the (...) perspective of a comprehensive set of ideas attributed to ‘positivism’. Both techniques were developed in the early 1950s by researchers at the RAND Corporation, a Californian think tank with tight relations to the US Air Force. Despite the closeness of origin, the two techniques show considerable differences in their basic epistemologies. The article thus concludes that more important than positivism in uniting US Cold War socialscience was the shared sense of urgency and of the potential of socialscience to put decision-making in foreign policy on a rational basis. In this sense, as far as the Cold War social sciences were of a piece, they were made so by the sense of danger and urgency of action evoked by the image of the Iron Curtain. (shrink)
In the fiftieth anniversary of this book’s first release, Winch’s argument remains as crucial as ever. Originally published in 1958, _The Idea of a SocialScience and Its Relation to Philosophy_ was a landmark exploration of the social sciences, written at a time when that field was still young and had not yet joined the Humanities and the Natural Sciences as the third great domain of the Academy. A passionate defender of the importance of philosophy to a (...) full understanding of 'society' against those who would deem it an irrelevant 'ivory towers' pursuit, Winch draws from the works of such thinkers as Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.S. Mill and Max Weber to make his case. In so doing he addresses the possibility and practice of a comprehensive 'science of society'. (shrink)
The paper aims at identifying, explaining and illustrating the affordances of “creative nonfiction” as a style of writing socialscience. The first part introduces creative nonfiction as a method of writing which brings together empirical material and fiction. In the second part, based on illustrations from my ethnographic research of European “crisis reporters,” written in the form of a novel about a fictional journalist, but also based on a review of existing socialscience research that employs (...) a creative method of writing, I identify several main affordances of creative nonfiction in social-scientific research. In particular, I argue that creative nonfiction allows scientists to illustrate their findings, to express them in an allegorical way, to organize data into a narrative, to let their pieces of research act in the social world, and to permeate research accounts with self-reflexive moments. I also discuss some apparent negative affordances: challenges that creative nonfiction poses to readers and to the institutionalized academic discourse. Finally, I suggest that writing about sociological problems in the style of creative nonfiction can help to produce more engaging and engaged texts, and I discuss the ethical implications of the approach. (shrink)
Concern for the rights and safety of individuals has caused clinical researchers to develop informed consent protocols for research involving human subjects. The applicapability of these regulations to socialscience research is often tenuous, since such research usually focuses on populations rather than individuals, and potential damage is apt to be political rather than personal. In cross-cultural social research, the protocols developed by Western clinical researchers may be not only ludicrously inapplicable, but intrusive and disruptive within the (...) cultural context, raising questions of the intellectual imperialism of Western research ethics. (shrink)
This anthology surveys an intellectual landscape vastly and importantly reshaped over the last twenty-five years. Historically, the philosophy of the social sciences has been an inquiry loosely organized around the problem of the scientific status of social knowledge. This problematic emerges with social sciences themselves in the latter part of the nineteenth century and continued, in one form or another, to dominate discussion through the better part of the next. A trio of core issues-- the scientific status (...) of intentional explanations (and agency), the nature of rationality, and the methodological hallmarks of science-- seemingly persist through current discussion and debate. But the substance attached to these issues has fundamentally shifted and altered. Without examining details of the substantive changes, the shifts in the subject matter remain obscured. This introduction examines what shifts and proposes an explanation of how and why it occurs. (shrink)
A traditional social scientific divide concerns the centrality of the interpretation of local understandings as opposed to attending to relatively general factors in understanding human individual and group differences. We consider one of the most common social scientific variables, race, and ask how to conceive of its causal power. We suggest that any plausible attempt to model the causal effects of such constructed social roles will involve close interplay between interpretationist and more general elements. Thus, we offer (...) a case study that one cannot offer a comprehensive model of the causal power of racial categories as social constructions without careful attention both to local meanings and more general mechanisms. (shrink)
The aim of the article is to intervene in debates about the digital and, in particular, framings that imagine the digital in terms of epochal shifts or as redefining life. Instead, drawing on recent developments in digital methods, we explore the lively, productive and performative qualities of the digital by attending to the specificities of digital devices and how they interact, and sometimes compete, with older devices and their capacity to mobilize and materialize social and other relations. In doing (...) so, our aim is to explore the implications of digital devices and data for reassembling socialscience methods or what we call the socialscience apparatuses that assemble digital devices and data to ‘know’ the social and other relations. Building on recent work at CRESC on the social life of methods, we recommend a genealogical approach that is alive to the ways in which digital devices are simultaneously shaped by social worlds, and can in turn become agents that shape those worlds. This calls for attending to the specificities of digital devices themselves, how they are varied and composed of diverse socio-technical arrangements, and are enrolled in the creation of new knowledge spaces, institutions and actors. Rather than exploring what large-scale changes can be revealed and understood through the digital, we argue for explorations of how digital devices themselves are materially implicated in the production and performance of contemporary sociality. To that end we offer the following nine propositions about the implications of digital data and devices and argue that these demand rethinking the theoretical assumptions of socialscience methods: transactional actors; heterogeneity; visualization; continuous time; whole populations; granularity; expertise; mobile and mobilizing; and non-coherence. (shrink)
This book argues that this powerful technique permits the social sciences to meet an explanation, in which one 'grows' the phenomenon of interest in an artificial society of interacting agents: heterogeneous, boundedly rational actors.
The problems dealt with in The Idea of a SocialScience are philosophical. It is an attempt to place the socialscience, considered as a single group, on the intellectual map, with special attention to the relations of the discipline to philosophy on the one hand and the natural sciences on the other. The author holds that the relation between the social sciences and philosophy is commonly misunderstood because of certain fashionable misconceptions about the nature (...) of philosophy, and because of an incorrect assessment of the significance of some of Wittgenstein's contributions. He discusses the influence of the natural sciences on our conception of the social sciences and examines some of the most influential ideas of J.S. Mill, Pareto and Max Weber. (shrink)
If we are sympathetic to the project of naturalising metaphysics, how should we approach the metaphysics of the social world? What role can the social sciences play in metaphysical investigation? In the light of these questions, this paper examines three possible approaches to social metaphysics: inference to the best explanation from current socialscience, conceptual analysis, and Haslanger-inspired ameliorative projects.
This paper explores Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of socialscience. In particular, it aims to show that the common assumption that Bourdieu remains trapped in a positivist paradigm does not do justice to his multifaceted account of socialscience. In order to illustrate the complexity of Bourdieu’s conception of socialscience, this study scrutinises ten epistemological tensions which can be found in his writings on the nature of systematic forms of knowledge production. In view of (...) these epistemological tensions, a more fine-grained picture emerges which demonstrates that Bourdieu compels us to reflect upon the complexity of the various tasks intrinsic to the pursuit of a critical socialscience. The paper concludes by discussing the limitations and shortcomings of the epistemological presuppositions that underpin Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology. (shrink)
In this essay, I provide normative guidelines for developing a philosophically interesting and plausible version of social constructivism as a philosophy of science, wherein science aims for social-epistemic values rather than for truth or empirical adequacy. This view is more plausible than the more radical constructivist claim that scientific facts are constructed. It is also more interesting than the modest constructivist claim that representations of such facts emerge in social contexts, as it provides a genuine (...) rival to the scientific axiologies of scientific realists and constructive empiricists. I further contrast my view with positions holding that the aims of science are context dependent, that the unit of normative analysis is the scientific community, and that the aims of science are non-epistemic social values. (shrink)
ABSTRACT The epistemological and methodological wars that bedevil socialscience often pit those who follow in the footsteps of natural science and those who favor a more holistic, interpretive approach. Into this war-torn landscape, Mark Bevir and Jason Blakley have dropped a plea for interpretive socialscience that will surely serve as a touchstone for years to come. However, their anti-naturalism is of the methodologically ecumenical kind, with the qualitative toolkit cohabiting with mass surveys, large-N (...) statistics, and other quantitative methods under well-specified conditions. The book’s insights therefore dovetail with emerging ecumenical trends in international political economy and even economics. (shrink)
This is an expanded and thoroughly revised edition of the widely adopted introduction to the philosophical foundations of the human sciences. Ranging from cultural anthropology to mathematical economics, Alexander Rosenberg leads the reader through behaviorism, naturalism, interpretativism about human action, and macrosocial scientific perspectives, illuminating the motivation and strategy of each.Rewritten throughout to increase accessibility, this new edition retains the remarkable achievement of revealing the social sciences’ enduring relation to the fundamental problems of philosophy. It includes new discussions of (...) positivism, European philosophy of history, causation, statistical laws, quantitative models, and postempiricist socialscience, along with a completely updated literature guide that keys chapters to widely anthologized papers. (shrink)
In the fiftieth anniversary of this book’s first release, Winch’s argument remains as crucial as ever. Originally published in 1958, _The Idea of a SocialScience and Its Relation to Philosophy_ was a landmark exploration of the social sciences, written at a time when that field was still young and had not yet joined the Humanities and the Natural Sciences as the third great domain of the Academy. A passionate defender of the importance of philosophy to a (...) full understanding of 'society' against those who would deem it an irrelevant 'ivory towers' pursuit, Winch draws from the works of such thinkers as Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.S. Mill and Max Weber to make his case. In so doing he addresses the possibility and practice of a comprehensive 'science of society'. (shrink)
In the fiftieth anniversary of this book’s first release, Winch’s argument remains as crucial as ever. Originally published in 1958, _The Idea of a SocialScience and Its Relation to Philosophy_ was a landmark exploration of the social sciences, written at a time when that field was still young and had not yet joined the Humanities and the Natural Sciences as the third great domain of the Academy. A passionate defender of the importance of philosophy to a (...) full understanding of 'society' against those who would deem it an irrelevant 'ivory towers' pursuit, Winch draws from the works of such thinkers as Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.S. Mill and Max Weber to make his case. In so doing he addresses the possibility and practice of a comprehensive 'science of society'. (shrink)
The relation between ethics and socialscience is often conceived as complementary, both disciplines cooperating in the solution of concrete moral problems. Against this, the paper argues that not only applied ethics but even certain parts of general ethics have to incorporate sociological and psychological data and theories from the start. Applied ethics depends on socialscience in order to asses the impact of its own principles on the concrete realities which these principles are to regulate (...) as well as in order to propose practice rules suited to adapt these principles to their respective contexts of application. Examples from medical ethics (embryo research) and ecological ethics (Leopold's land ethic) illustrate both the contingence of practice rules in relation to their underlying basic principles and the corresponding need for a co-operation between philosophy and empirical disciplines in judging their functional merits and demerits. In conclusion, the relevance of empirical hypotheses even for some of the perennial problems of ethics is shown by clarifying the role played by empirical theories in the controversies about the ethical differentiation between positive and negative responsibility and the relation between utility maximisation and (seemingly) independent criteria of distributive justice in the context of social distributions. (shrink)
My goal here is to come to terms with the Enlightenment as the horizon of critical socialscience. First, I consider in more detail the understanding of the Enlightenment in Critical Theory, particularly in its conception of the sociality of reason. Second, I develop an account of freedom in terms of human powers, along the lines of recent capability conceptions that link freedom to the development of human powers, including the power to interpret and create norms. Finally, I (...) show the ways in which the social sciences can be moral sciences in the Enlightenment sense. This account provides us with a coherent Enlightenment standard by which to judge institutions as promoting development, understood in terms of the capabilities necessary for freedom. The relevant socialscience in this area might include the robust generalization that there has never been a famine in a democratic society. (shrink)
Abstract This paper introduces a vision of moral education for the future. It argues that for moral education to take its place as essential in the curriculum, moral educators must acknowledge and adopt the goal for moral education expected by lay?people and by society; that is, to create better societies and a better world in addition to developing the character and moral acumen of individuals. Examples are used to argue that the world is a smaller, and also a new, place (...) due to the impact of technology on our political and economic systems and due to the impact of computer communication on our social and educational relations. The new world must be entered with a much richer understanding of the multilayered histories and present situations of our world, if people, groups and nations are to live with one another in mutual respect and dignity. Thus, this paper argues for a vision of moral education as an historical, political and socialscience of morality, conducted as laboratory experiences which can educate and enable students to take moral perspectives on issues they will inevitably face and to be moral agents as citizens of the earth in the 21st century. (shrink)
In the past two decades, many anthropologists have been drawn to "interpre tive" perspectives which hold that the study of human culture would profit by using approaches developed in the humanities, rather than using approaches used in the natural sciences. The author discusses the source of the appeal of such perspectives but argues that interpretive approaches to socialscience tend to be fundamentally flawed, even by common everyday epistemological standards.
A response to a declaration in 'Le Monde', 'Luttons efficacement contre les théories du complot' by Gérald Bronner, Véronique Campion-Vincent, Sylvain Delouvée, Sebastian Dieguez, Karen Douglas, Nicolas Gauvrit, Anthony Lantian, and Pascal Wagner-Egger, published on June the 6th, 2016.
In the classic study Little science, big science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), Derek Price traces the historical shift from what he calls little science?exemplified by early?modern ?invisible colleges? of scientific amateurs and enthusiasts engaged in small?scale, informal interactions and personal correspondence?to 20th?century big science, dominated by professional scientists and wealthy institutions, where scientific information (primarily in print form and its analogues) was mass?produced, marketed and circulated on a global scale. This article considers whether the (...) growing use of more participatory, interactive ?Web 2.0? technologies and social media in science today (e.g. wikis, blogs, tagging and bookmarking, conferencing, etc.) may signal a revival of little science modes of communication that contrast with big science conventions that continue to dominate research policy, scientific institutions, and the publishing industry. A brief historical review of responses to the scientific ?information explosion? since the early 1900s is presented, with a particular focus on the idealization of large?scale, automated information systems and the privileging of formal (document?producing) over informal (interpersonal) modes of scientific communication. Alternative frameworks for scientific communication that incorporate both documents and interaction are used to examine contemporary examples of so?called Science 2.0 and citizen science projects to determine whether such projects indicate the emergence of new modes of communication in science that bridge the immediacy and involvement of invisible colleges and the rigor of peer?reviewed publishing. The implications for traditional documentary forms such as the journal article are also discussed. (shrink)
The social sciences need to take seriously their status as divisions of biology. As such they need to recognize the central role of Darwinian processes in all the phenomena they seek to explain. An argument for this claim is formulated in terms of a small number of relatively precise premises that focus on the nature of the kinds and taxonomies of all the social sciences. The analytical taxonomies of all the social sciences are shown to require a (...) Darwinian approach to human affairs, though not a nativist or genetically driven theory by any means. Non-genetic Darwinian processes have the fundamental role on all human affairs. I expound a general account of how Darwinian processes operate in human affairs by selecting for strategies and sets of strategies individuals and groups employ. I conclude by showing how a great deal of socialscience can be organized in accordance with Tinbergen’s approach to biological inquiry, an approach required by the fact that the social sciences are all divisions of biology, and in particular the studies of one particular biological species. (shrink)
This textbook by Martin Hollis offers an exceptionally clear and concise introduction to the philosophy of socialscience. It examines questions which give rise to fundamental philosophical issues. Are social structures better conceived of as systems of laws and forces, or as webs of meanings and practices? Is social action better viewed as rational behaviour, or as self-expression? By exploring such questions, the reader is led to reflect upon the nature of scientific method in social (...)science. Is the aim to explain the social world after a manner worked out for the natural world, or to understand the social world from within? (shrink)
Two major socialscience perspectives on wife abuse have emerged in the last decade. One is a family violence perspective; the other is a feminist perspective. The purpose of this article is to compare the basic premises, methodology, and conclusions of these two perspectives with respect to their views of women and gender. The perspectives differ in the priority that they assign to gender as a factor in the abuse of women by husbands and male intimates, and these (...) differences have implications for research and policy on wife abuse. I argue that the feminist perspective portrays the realities of battering more accurately, and I conclude with directions for future research. (shrink)
In this lucid and engaging introductory volume on the nature of society, Roger Trigg examines the scientific basis of socialscience and shows that philosophical presuppositions are a necessary starting point for the study of society.
The Philosophy of SocialScience: A Contemporary Introduction examines the perennial questions of philosophy by engaging with the empirical study of society. The book offers a comprehensive overview of debates in the field, with special attention to questions arising from new research programs in the social sciences. The text uses detailed examples of social scientific research to motivate and illustrate the philosophical discussion. Topics include the relationship of social policy to socialscience, interpretive (...) research, action explanation, game theory, social scientific accounts of norms, joint intentionality, reductionism, causal modeling, case study research, and experimentation. (shrink)
Is socialscience really a science at all, and if so in what sense? This is the first real question that any course on the philosophy of the social sciences must tackle. In this brief introduction, Malcolm Williams gives the students the grounding that will enable them to discuss the issues involved with confidence.
