Tracing the history of American sociology since the Civil War, the authors of this important volume explain the field′s diversity, its lack of unifying paradigms, its broad, eclectic research agenda and its general weakness as an institutional force in either academia or the policy arena. They highlight the equivocal and often contradictory missions that sociologists prescribe for themselves and the variable nature of human, financial and intellectual resources available to the profession.

In what follows I propose to bring out certain methodological properties of projects of modelling the tacit realm that bear on the kinds of modelling done in connection with scientific cognition by computer as well as by ethnomethodological sociologists, both of whom must make some claims about the tacit in the course of their efforts to model cognition. The same issues, I will suggest, bear on the project of a cognitive psychology of science as well.

Normativity is what gives reasons their force, makes words meaningful, and makes rules and laws binding. It is present whenever we use such terms as ‘correct,' ‘ought,' ‘must,' and the language of obligation, responsibility, and logical compulsion. Yet normativists, the philosophers committed to this idea, admit that the idea of a non-causal normative realm and a body of normative objects is spooky. Explaining the Normative is the first systematic, historically grounded critique of normativism. It identifies the standard normativist pattern of (...) argument, and shows how this pattern depends on circularities, assumptions about the unique correctness of preferred descriptions, problematic transcendental arguments, and regress arguments that end in mysteries. The book considers in detail a paradigm case: legal normativity as constructed by Hans Kelsen. This case exemplifies the problems with normativist arguments. But it also shows how normativism was constructed as an alternative to ordinary social science explanation. The normativist argument is that social science explanations themselves are forced to rely on normative conceptsÑminimally, on normative rationality and on a normative view of ‘concepts' themselves. Empathic understanding of the reasoning and meanings of others, however, can solve the regress problems about meaning and rationality that are central to the appeal of normativism. This account has no need for a parallel normative world, and has a surprising and revealing lineage in the history of philosophy, as well as a basis in neuroscience. (shrink)

Incompatibilists believe free will is impossible if determinism is true, and they often claim that this view is supported by ordinary intuitions. We challenge the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive to most laypersons and discuss the significance of this challenge to the free will debate. After explaining why incompatibilists should want their view to accord with pretheoretical intuitions, we suggest that determining whether incompatibilism is in fact intuitive calls for empirical testing. We then present the results of our studies, which (...) put significant pressure on the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive. Finally, we consider and respond to several potential objections to our approach. (shrink)

In the nineteenth century, there was substantial and sophisticated interest in neuroscience on the part of social theorists, including Comte and Spencer, and later Simon Patten and Charles Ellwood. This body of thinking faced a dead end: it could do little more than identify highly general mechanisms, and could not provide accounts of such questions as `why was there no proletarian revolution?' Psychologically dubious explanations, relying on neo-Kantian views of the mind, replaced them. With the rise of neuroscience, however, some (...) of the problems of concern to earlier thinkers, such as imitation, have revived because of the discovery of neuronal mechanisms, or through fMRI studies. The article reviews the history and discusses the implications of current work for the reconsideration of traditional social theory concepts. It is suggested that certain kinds of bridging work with neuroscience would enable us to answer many questions in social theory that empirical sociology has failed to answer. (shrink)

The concept of "practices"--whether of representation, of political or scientific traditions, or of organizational culture--is central to social theory. In this book, Stephen Turner presents the first analysis and critique of the idea of practice as it has developed in the various theoretical traditions of the social sciences and the humanities. Understood broadly as a tacit understanding "shared" by a group, the concept of a practice has a fatal difficulty, Turner argues: there is no plausible mechanism by (...) which a "practice" is transmitted or reproduced. The historical uses of the concept, from Durkheim to Kripke's version of Wittgenstein, provide examples of the contortions that thinkers have been forced into by this problem, and show the ultimate implausibility of the idea. Turner's conclusion sketches a picture of what happens when we do without the notion of a shared practice, and how this bears on social theory and philosophy. It explains why social theory cannot get beyond the stage of constructing fuzzy analogies, and why the standard constructions of the contemporary philosophical problem of relativism depend upon this defective notion. This first book-length critique of practice theory is sure to stir discussion and controversy in a wide range of fields, from philosophy and science studies to sociology, anthropology, literary studies, and political and legal theory. (shrink)

Incompatibilists believe free will is impossible if determinism is true, and they often claim that this view is supported by ordinary intuitions. We challenge the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive to most laypersons and discuss the significance of this challenge to the free will debate. After explaining why incompatibilists should want their view to accord with pretheoretical intuitions, we suggest that determining whether incompatibilism is in fact intuitive calls for empirical testing. We then present the results of our studies, which (...) put significant pressure on the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive. Finally, we consider and respond to several potential objections to our approach. (shrink)

Philosophers often suggest that their theories of free will are supported by our phenomenology. Just as their theories conflict, their descriptions of the phenomenology of free will often conflict as well. We suggest that this should motivate an effort to study the phenomenology of free will in a more systematic way that goes beyond merely the introspective reports of the philosophers themselves. After presenting three disputes about the phenomenology of free will, we survey the (limited) psychological research on the experiences (...) relevant to the philosophical debates and then describe some pilot studies of our own with the aim of encouraging further research. The data seem to support compatibilist descriptions of the phenomenology more than libertarian descriptions. We conclude that the burden is on libertarians to find empirical support for their more demanding metaphysical theories with their more controversial phenomenological claims. (shrink)

Current sociological theories appear to have lost their general persuasiveness in part because, unlike the theories of the ‘classical era’, they fail to maintain an integrated stance toward society, and the practical role that sociology plays in society. The authors explore various facets of this failure and possibilities for reconstructing sociological theories as integrated wholes capable of conveying a moral and political immediacy. They discuss the evolution of several concepts (for example, the social, structure, and self) and address the significant (...) disputes (for example, structuralism versus humanism, and individual versus society) that have dominated twentieth-century sociological thought. Their ideas and analyses are directed towards an audience of students and theorists who are coming to terms with the project of sociological theory, and its relationship with moral discourses and political practice. The authors of these essays are sociological theorists from the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. They are all established, but not ‘establishment’ authors. The book contains no orthodoxies, and no answers. However, the essays do contribute to identifying the range of issues that will constitute the agenda for the next generation of sociological theorists. (shrink)

The question of whether sociology progresses, and how, has been an issue within sociology itself. In this chapter, the reasons for this are explored. The first set relates to the status of ‘theories’ in sociology, which, despite historical aspirations to universality, are not predictive systems that generate puzzles but second-order definitions and ideal types, which abstract over intelligible world of the subjects. They can loosely be said to progress in the sense of providing new ways of framing in response to (...) generically defined concerns, such as the stability of elites, and novel social situations. The second set relates to quantitative models. Examples from causal modelling, a basic form of statistical modelling, are discussed to show how this same problem bears on them. They depend on assumptions about which correlations can be plausibly regarded as causal, and which are outside the system and can be ignored. As the social world changes, these assumptions gain or lose plausibility, and the models themselves lose applicability and predictive power. Change here amounts to providing a better fit to novel situations. But the models are purpose relative and the aims, and therefore progress, are externally defined, typically by changing normative or policy concerns. (shrink)

Philosophers working in the nascent field of ‘experimental philosophy’ have begun using methods borrowed from psychology to collect data about folk intuitions concerning debates ranging from action theory to ethics to epistemology. In this paper we present the results of our attempts to apply this approach to the free will debate, in which philosophers on opposing sides claim that their view best accounts for and accords with folk intuitions. After discussing the motivation for such research, we describe our methodology of (...) surveying people’s prephilosophical judgments about the freedom and responsibility of agents in deterministic scenarios. In two studies, we found that a majority of participants judged that such agents act of their own free will and are morally responsible for their actions. We then discuss the philosophical implications of our results as well as various difficulties inherent in such research. (shrink)

The concept of "practices"—whether of representation, of political or scientific traditions, or of organizational culture—is central to social theory. In this book, Stephen Turner presents the first analysis and critique of the idea of practice as it has developed in the various theoretical traditions of the social sciences and the humanities. Understood broadly as a tacit understanding "shared" by a group, the concept of a practice has a fatal difficulty, Turner argues: there is no plausible mechanism by (...) which a "practice" is transmitted or reproduced. The historical uses of the concept, from Durkheim to Kripke's version of Wittgenstein, provide examples of the contortions that thinkers have been forced into by this problem, and show the ultimate implausibility of the idea. Turner's conclusion sketches a picture of what happens when we do without the notion of a shared practice, and how this bears on social theory and philosophy. It explains why social theory cannot get beyond the stage of constructing fuzzy analogies, and why the standard constructions of the contemporary philosophical problem of relativism depend upon this defective notion. This first book-length critique of practice theory is sure to stir discussion and controversy in a wide range of fields, from philosophy and science studies to sociology, anthropology, literary studies, and political and legal theory. (shrink)

In this essay we will consider another basic topic: the problem of the nature of the distinctions between Sitte, Brauch, Wert, Mode, and Recht, on which Weber's discussion relies. These discussions typically involved the untranslatable concept of Sitte, which marks a contrast between practices or customs with normative force and “mere practice.” There is a close parallel to this distinction in American social thought in W. G. Sumner's latinate distinction between the mores and folkways of a society. In what follows (...) we shall simply use the German term as a reminder of its long history in German philosophy. Weber was obviously aware of this history, as was Jhering. Our aim will be to examine Weber's modifications of the received version of these distinctions and to consider the Implications of these modifications. As we shall see, what Weber represents as an innocuous classificatory problem contains a much more significant conceptual transformation, which bears on the general image of modernity as rationalization constructed by Weber. (shrink)

These essays critically reassess the widely accepted view that statistical methods of analysis can, and do, yield causal understanding of social phenomena. They emphasize the historical, philosophical and conceptual perspectives that underlie and inform current methodological controversies.

Edward Shils was a central figure in twentieth century social thought. He held appointments both at Chicago and Cambridge and was a crucial link between British and American intellectual life. This volume collects essays by distinguished contributors which deal with the major facets of Shils' thought, including his relations with Michael Polanyi, his parallels with Michael Oakeshott, his defense of the traditional university, his fundamental philosophical anthropology, and his important work on such topics as tradition, civility, and the nation. As (...) an introduction to this complex and original thinker, it will be of interest to scholars and students in a number of fields, including sociology and social theory, but also to anyone interested in the intellectual life as it was lived in the mid-twentieth century, in the face of the Cold War and ideological struggle. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars described the moral syllogism that supports the inference “I ought to do x” from “Everyone ought to do x” as a “syntactical disguise” which embodies a “mistake.” He nevertheless regarded this form of reasoning as constitutive of the moral point of view. Durkheim was the source of much of this reasoning, and this context illuminates Sellars’ unusual philosophical reconstruction of the moral point of view in terms of the collective intentions of an ideal community of rational members for (...) which the syllogism is empirically valid. The reconstruction also sheds light on the question of the status of common sense and normativity in Sellars’ naturalistic metaphysics. (shrink)

The late 1960s are remembered today as the last time wholesale social upheaval shook Europe and the United States. College students during that tumultuous period—epitomized by the events of May 1968—were as permanently marked in their worldviews as their parents had been by the Depression and World War II. Sociology was at the center of these events, and it changed decisively because of them. The Disobedient Generation collects newly written autobiographies by an international cross-section of well-known sociologists, all of them (...) "children of the ’60s." It illuminates the human experience of living through that decade as apprentice scholars and activists, encountering the issues of class, race, the Establishment, the decline of traditional religion, feminism, war, and the sexual revolution. In each case the interlinked crises of young adulthood, rapid change, and nascent professional careers shaped this generation’s private and public selves. This is an intensely personal collective portrait of a generation in a time of struggle. (shrink)

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Social Theory After Cognitive Science1. Throwing Out the Tacit Rule Book: Learning and Practices2. Searle's Social Reality3. Imitation or the Internalization of Norms: Is Twentieth-Century Social Theory Based on the Wrong Choice?4. Relativism as Explanation5. The Limits of Social Constructionism6. Making Normative Soup Out of Nonnormative Bones7. Teaching Subtlety of Thought: The Lessons of "Contextualism"8. Practice in Real Time9. The Significance of ShilsReferences Index Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

The phenomenon of expertise produces two problems for liberal democratic theory: the first is whether it creates inequalities that undermine citizen rule or make it a sham; the second is whether the state can preserve its neutrality in liberal ’government by discussion’ while subsidizing, depending on, and giving special status to, the opinions of experts and scientists. A standard Foucauldian critique suggests that neutrality is impossible, expert power and state power are inseparable, and that expert power is the source of (...) the oppressive, inegalitarian effects of present regimes. Habermas argues that expert cultures make democratic discussion impossible. Analogous problems arise with ’cognitive authority’, understood in Mertonian terms. Cognitive authority, as Merton sees it, allows us to ask about the democratic legitimacy of this authority, which appears to solve the problem (or part of the problem) because it returns ultimate ’authority’ to the people, who reject or accept the experts’ claims. And many claims to expertise in fact do fail to gain acceptance. Through an examination of the type of expert that appears to evade the demands of legitimation, it is shown that expertise and liberal democracy can in principle co-exist, contrary to the claims of the critics. (shrink)

The problem of the nature of values and the relation between values and rationality is one of the defining issues of twentieth-century thought and Max Weber was one of the defining figures in the debate. In this book, Turner and Factor consider the development of the dispute over Max Weber's contribution to this discourse, by showing how Weber's views have been used, revised and adapted in new contexts. The story of the dispute is itself fascinating, for it cuts across (...) the major political and intellectual currents of the twentieth century, from positivism, pragmatism and value-free social science, through the philosophy of Jaspers and Heidegger, to Critical Theory and the revival of Natural Right and Natural Law. As Weber's ideas were imported to Britain and America, they found new formulations and new adherents and critics and became absorbed into different traditions and new issues. This book was first published in 1984. (shrink)

The rise of cognitive neuroscience is the most important scientific and intellectual development of the last thirty years. Findings pour forth, and major initiatives for brain research continue. The social sciences have responded to this development slowly--for good reasons. The implications of particular controversial findings, such as the discovery of mirror neurons, have been ambiguous, controversial within neuroscience itself, and difficult to integrate with conventional social science. Yet many of these findings, such as those of experimental neuro-economics, pose very direct (...) challenges to standard social science. At the same time, however, the known facts of social science, for example about linguistic and moral diversity, pose a significant challenge to standard neuroscience approaches, which tend to focus on "universal" aspects of human and animal cognition. A serious encounter between cognitive neuroscience and social science is likely to be challenging, and transformative, for both parties. Although a literature has developed on proposals to integrate neuroscience and social science, these proposals go in divergent directions. None of them has a developed conception of social life. This book surveys these issues, introduces the basic alternative conceptions both of the mental world and the social world, and show how, with sufficient modification, they can be fit together in plausible ways. The book is not a "new theory " of anything, but rather an exploration of the critical issues that relate to the social aspects of cognition which expands the topic from the social neuroscience of immediate interpersonal interaction to the whole range of places where social variation interacts with the cognitive. The focus is on the conceptual problems produced by any attempt to take these issues seriously, and also on the new resources and considerations relevant to doing so. But it is also on the need for a revision of social theoretical concepts in order to utilize these resources. The book points to some conclusions, especially about how the process of what was known as socialization needs to be understood in cognitive science friendly terms. But there is no attempt to resolve the underlying issues within cognitive science, which will doubtless persist. (shrink)

Stephen Turner has explored the ongms of social science in this pioneering study of two nineteenth century themes: the search for laws of human social behavior, and the accumulation and analysis of the facts of such behavior through statistical inquiry. The disputes were vigorously argued; they were over questions of method, criteria of explanation, interpretations of probability, understandings of causation as such and of historical causation in particular, and time and again over the ways of using a natural (...) science model. From his careful elucidation of John Stuart Mill's proposals for the methodology of the social sciences on to his original analysis of the methodological claims and practices of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, Turner has beautifully traced the conflict between statistical sociology and a science offactual description on the one side, and causal laws and a science of nomological explanation on the other. We see the works of Comte and Quetelet, the critical observations of Herschel, Buckle, Venn and Whewell, and the tough scepticism of Pearson, all of these as essential to the works of the classical founders of sociology. With Durkheim's essay on Suicide and Weber's monograph on The Protestant Ethic, Turner provides both philosophical analysis to demonstrate the continuing puzzles over cause and probability and also a perceptive and wry account of just how the puzzles of our late twentieth century are of a piece with theirs. The terms are still familiar: reasons vs. (shrink)

The triangular relationship between the social, the political and the cultural has opened up social and political theory to new challenges. The social can no longer be reduced to the category of society, and the political extends beyond the traditional concerns of the nature of the state and political authority. -/- This Handbook will address a range of issues that have recently emerged from the disciplines of social and political theory, focusing on key themes as opposed to schools of thought (...) or major theorists. It is divided into three sections which address: -/- the most influential theoretical traditions that have emerged from the legacy of the twentieth century -/- the most important new and emerging frameworks of analysis today -/- the major theoretical problems in recent social and political theory. (shrink)

This book explores the shift in sociology away from the shared aspiration of the classical transition, of transcending partiality through the construction of a "science of society", in the face of challenges to the notion of objectivity. With the increasing subjugation of sociology to political ideologies and a growing emphasis on "policy", which casts sociology in the role of a provider of intellectual content for political programs, this volume asks whether the situation is the result of an exhaustion of ideas (...) or might perhaps be rooted in the failure in the very program of establishing sociology as a science. Taking seriously the challenges to the classical aspiration of constructing theories that both explain and are grounded in empirical reality, The Future of Sociology asks whether the core idea of transcending ideology is still worth pursuing, and whether there remains scope for making sociology scientific. As such, it will appeal to scholars and students of sociology, social theory, and social scientific methodology. (shrink)

Robert Merton's essays on theories of the middle range and his essays on functional explanation and the structural approach are among the most influential in the history of sociology. But their import is a puzzle. He explicitly allied himself with some of the most extreme scientistic formalists and contributed to and endorsed the Columbia model of theory construction. But Merton never responded to criticisms by Ernest Nagel of his arguments or acknowledged the rivalry between Lazarsfeld and Herbert Simon, rarely cited (...) the philosophical and methodological literature, and responded to critics with ambiguous concessions, leaving the Mertonian legacy profoundly ambiguous. Key Words: Robert Merton • Paul Lazarsfeld • theory construction • middle range theory • causal modeling • Émile Durkheim. (shrink)

Lizardo argues that The Social Theory of Practices is refuted by the discovery of mirror neurons. The book argues that the kind of sameness of tacit mental content assumed by practice theorists such as Bourdieu is fictional, because there is no actual process by which the same mental content can be transmitted. Mirror neurons, Lizardo claims, provide such a mechanism, as they imply that bodily automatisms, which can be understood as the basis of habitus and concepts, can be shared and (...) copied from one person to another. This response to Lizardo points out that the Gallese arguments on which Lizardo relies relate to phylogenetic and universal body movements, not to the learned movements characteristic of practices, and that there is no sameness producing mechanism parallel to the genetic one. (shrink)

Models are the coin of the realm in current philosophy of science, as they are in science itself, having replaced laws and theories as the primary strategy. Logical Positivism tried to erase the older neo-Kantian distinction between ideal constructions and reality. It returns in the case of models. Nowak’s concept of idealization pro- vided an alternative account of this issue. It construed model application as concretizations of hypotheses which improve by accounting for exceptions. This appears to account for physical law. (...) But it raises the problem of uniqueness: is the result unique, as physical law should be? Neo-Kantianism failed this test. Its solutions were circular justifications for claims of uniqueness. Nowak inherited the problem without resolving it. (shrink)

This book collects case studies and theoretical papers on expertise, focusing on four major themes: legitimation, the aggregation of knowledge, the distribution of knowledge and the distribution of power. It focuses on the institutional means by which the distribution of knowledge and the distribution of power are connected, and how the problems of aggregating knowledge and legitimating it are solved by these structures. The radical novelty of this approach is that it places the traditional discussion of expertise in democracy into (...) a much larger framework of knowledge and power relations, and in addition begins to raise the questions of epistemology that a serious account of these problems requires. (shrink)

The relationship between the social sciences and the cognitive sciences is underdeveloped and complicated, for reasons we will explain in this chapter, and the philosophical discussion of this relationship has the same properties. Many reasons for the lack of development relate to a traditional philosophical issue: explanation. The explanatory structure of cognitive science reasoning and argumentation is unusual and difcult to t into the traditional model of scientic explanation, though they do relate, in an odd way, to the traditional “reasons” (...) explanations discussed in the philosophy of social science, through the notion of “folk psychology.” The cognitive science explanations themselves, as they relate to traditional “social science” topics, involve additional problems. They depend on a strategy of reducing complexity by beginning with those aspects of mind that can be most readily simplied, such as perception and body movements. Therefore, traditional social science topics, such as social interaction, which cannot be readily simplied, are something of an afterthought. (shrink)

'... a powerful piece of work that deserves to be read widely. It ranges across central concerns in the fields of social theory, political theory, and science studies and engages with the ideas of key classical and contemporary thinkers' - Barry Smart, Professor of Sociology, University of Portsmouth.

Verstehen, understanding another human being through some form of empathy, is a natural process with the involvement, probably in a complex way, of the brain. There is a temptation to describe Vers...

Wilfrid Sellars read and annotated Celestine Bouglé’s Evolution of Values, translated by his mother with an introduction by his father. The book expounded Émile Durkheim's account of morality and elaborated his account of origins of value in collective social life. Sellars replaced elements of this account in constructing his own conception of the relationship between the normative and community, but preserved a central one: the idea that conflicting collective and individual intentions could be found in the same person. These notoriously (...) opaque arguments, which seek to save an element of rationalism from social explanation while granting the claims of behavioural science, are illuminated by comparing them to their original Durkheimian form. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper builds on a neglected philosophical idea,Evidenz. Max Weber used it in his discussion ofVerstehen, as the goal of understanding either action or such things as logic. It was formulated differently by Franz Brentano, but with a novel twist: thatanyonewho understood something would see the thing to be understood as self-evident, not something dependent on inference, argument, or reasoning. The only way one could take something as evident in this sense is by being able to treat other people as (...) having the same responses – by empathy with them, in the weak sense of following their thought. Brentano's philosophical claim is that without some stopping point at what is self-evident, justifications fall into infinite regress. This is radically opposed to much of conventional philosophy. The usual solutions to the regress problem rely on problematic claims about the supposed hidden transcendental structure behind reasoning. In contrast, empathy is a genuine natural phenomenon and a better explanation for the actual phenomenon of making sense of the reasoning of others. What is evident to all who are capable of understanding is an empirically-defined subset of this class. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Origins of the Philosophy of Social Science Winch's Triad The Legitimation of “Continental” Philosophy Enter Davidson Rational Choice: The Scientization of the Intentional Philosophy of Social Science Today Notes.

Charles Perrow used the term normal accidents to characterize a type of catastrophic failure that resulted when complex, tightly coupled production systems encountered a certain kind of anomalous event. These were events in which systems failures interacted with one another in a way that could not be anticipated, and could not be easily understood and corrected. Systems of the production of expert knowledge are increasingly becoming tightly coupled. Unlike classical science, which operated with a long time horizon, many current forms (...) of expert knowledge are directed at immediate solutions to complex problems. These are prone to breakdowns like the kind discussed by Perrow. The example of the Homestake mine experiment shows that even in modern physics complex systems can produce knowledge failures that last for decades. The concept of knowledge risk is introduced, and used to characterize the risk of failure in such systems of knowledge production. (shrink)

Explanations implicitly end with something that makes sense, and begin with something that does not make sense. A statistical relationship, for example, a numerical fact, does not make sense; an explanation of this relationship adds something, such as causal information, which does make sense, and provides an endpoint for the sense-making process. Does social science differ from natural science in this respect? One difference is that in the natural sciences, models are what need ‘‘understanding.’’ In the social sciences, matters are (...) more complex. There are models, such as causal models, which need to be understood, but also depend on background knowledge that goes beyond the model and the correlations that make it up, which produces a regress. The background knowledge is knowledge of in-filling mechanisms, which are normally made up of elements that involve the direct understanding of the acting and believing subjects themselves. These models, and social science explanations generally, are satisfactory only when they end the regress in this kind of understanding or use direct understanding evidence to decide between alternative mechanism explanations. (shrink)