Here I discuss the philosophical contributions to Analytical Sociology and Social Mechanisms, a collection of essays edited by Pierre Demeulenaere. I begin by introducing the idea of a social mechanism and showing that it has already had an impact within empirical analytical sociology. I then discuss some examples of the philosophical work offered in Demeulenaere’s collection in support of this analytical "movement" in the social sciences. I argue that some of these examples demonstrate thin scholarship and only a veneer of philosophical argument, but that Jon Elster’s contribution fuses impressively philosophical analysis and social science. I conclude by suggesting that analytical sociologists should focus on producing sociological explanations not philosophical theories.
The issue of causal comparability in the social sciences underlies matters of both generalization and extrapolation (or external validity). After critiquing two existing interpretations of comparability, due to Hitchcock and Hausman, I propose a distinction between ontological and epistemic comparability. While the former refers to whether two cases are actually comparable, the latter respects that in cases of incomplete information, we need to rely on whatever evidence we have of comparability. I argue, using a political science case study, that in those cases of imperfect information, an epistemic homogeneity criterion can be an adequate justification for generalization.
The basic approach to understanding shared agency (or joint action) has been to identify individual intentional states that are somehow "shared" by participants and that contribute to guiding and informing the actions of individual participants. But, as Michael Bratman suggests, there is a problem of stability and depth that any theory of shared agency needs to solve. Given that participants in a joint action might form shared intentions for different reasons, what binds them to one another such that they have some reason for continuing to participate in the joint action in the face of conflicting reasons? This is particularly pressing in cases of joint actions that unfold over long periods of time. There are a variety of ways that the problem of stability and depth of shared intention might be addressed. We review some of those ways in section 1. We do not intend to challenge these approaches. Instead, in this article, we want to suggest that narrative is an additional, perhaps in some cases a predominant, way in which stability and depth are achieved. According to some theories, narrative plays a crucial role in the development of the self. Our suggestion is that the narratives we tell about our joint projects contribute to the development of a stable and deep "we."
This article evaluates the idea of the modularity of mind and domain specificity. This concept has penetrated the behavioral disciplines, and in the case of some of these—for example, the cognitive study of religion—has even formed their foundation. Although the theoretical debate relating to the idea of modularity is ongoing, this debate has not been reflected in the use of modularity in behavioral research. The idea of domain specificity or modularity of mind is not without its controversies, and there is no consensus regarding its acceptance. Many neuroscientists, as well as several evolutionary psychologists and philosophers, have raised a number of objections that cannot remain overlooked. I will show the areas in which the idea is problematic, what attempts have been made to preserve it, and how social scientific research can move beyond post-Fodorian modularity without losing any valuable insights.
I explore conceptual tensions that emerge between Wilfrid Sellars’ and Grace de Laguna’s adoption of behaviorism. Despite agreeing on various points (e.g., the social nature of language and behavior, a methodological commitment to behaviorism), I argue that Sellars’ and de Laguna’s positions represent a split between normativist and descriptivist approaches to explanation that are generally incompatible, and I explore how both positions claim conceptual priority.
The predictive inadequacy of the social sciences is well documented, and philosophers have sought to diagnose it. This paper examines Brian Epstein’s recent diagnosis. He argues that the social sciences treat the social world as entirely composed of individual people. Instead, social scientists should recognize that material, non-individualistic entities determine the social world, as well. First, I argue that Epstein’s argument both begs the question against his opponents and is not sufficiently charitable. Second, I present doubts that his proposal will improve predictive success for the social sciences, which I support with Edith Penrose’s resource-based theory of the firm.
Many philosophers regard collective behavior and attitudes as the ground of the whole of social reality. According to this popular view, society is composed basically of collective intentions and cooperative behaviors; this is so both for informal contexts involving small groups and for complex institutional structures. In this article, I challenge this view, and propose an alternative approach, which I term institutional externalism. I argue that institutions are characterized by the tendency to defer to elements that are external to the content of collective intentions—such as laws, declarations, and contracts. According to institutional externalism, those elements are the grounds of institutional statutes, rights, and duties.
This article introduces comparative process tracing (CPT) as a two-step methodological approach that combines theory, chronology, and comparison. For each studied case, the processes leading "from A to B" are reconstructed and analyzed in terms of ideal-type social mechanisms and then compared by making use of the identified mechanisms and ideal-type periodization. Central elements of CPT are path dependence, critical junctures and focal points, social mechanisms, context, periodization, and counterfactual analysis. The CPT approach is described, discussed, and compared with more formal and deterministic forms of process tracing, which are found to be less fruitful for systematic comparison.
Peter Mandler’s Return from the Natives examines Margaret Mead mid-career when she devoted much energy to promoting anthropology and anthropologists to government and industry and positioned herself as a prominent social commentator. By the time she returned to the field after an interlude of 14 years, something had happened to her professionally: she was treated as a bit of an embarrassment, no longer a scientific heavyweight, and much of this stems from the rather hare-brained "culture cracking" she engaged in during the war. So while honors and kudos enhanced her official image, behind the scenes, she complained of being neglected and shunted aside. Her discipline became radicalized, and her balanced and accommodating approach was rejected.
The article shows how in Outline of a Theory of Practice Pierre Bourdieu relies on a kind of philosophical myth in his attempt to dispel structuralist accounts of action. Section 2 is a summary of Bourdieu’s use of the concept of habitus against intellectualism and structuralism. Schatzki’s criticism of Bourdieu from a purportedly Wittgensteinian perspective is also examined. Section 3 relates Bourdieu’s use of habitus to a debate between Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell about the role of concepts in action. Section 4 shows how McDowell’s rejection of foundationalist elements in Dreyfus’s account of action also raises problems for Bourdieu’s account of action. Diamond’s recent criticism of Winch is shown to have an interesting connection to this debate.
In this article, I will discuss two prominent views on the relevance and irrelevance of ontological investigations for the social sciences, namely, ontological foundationalism and anti-ontological pragmatism. I will argue that both views are unsatisfactory. The subsequent part of the article will introduce an alternative role for ontological projects in the philosophy of the social sciences that fares better in this respect by paying attention to the ontological assumptions of actual social scientific theories, models, and related explanatory practices. I will illustrate and support this alternative through discussion of three concrete cases.
For me, personally, Wittgenstein’s philosophy poses the greatest challenge: if he is right, the sort of philosophy I am attempting to do is impossible. Wittgenstein argued powerfully that there can be no such thing as a general philosophical theory of language, mind, consciousness, society, and so on. I wanted and still do want to do precisely that: to present a general philosophical theory of language, mind, consciousness, society, and so on.
Some aspects of Wittgenstein’s thought are considered in the light of a remark he makes about the "apocalyptic" view of the world. The influence of Tolstoy on Wittgenstein is discussed and elaborated with reference to the idea of a "form of life" as a locus of order, and also to that of "exceptionality" in an unfolding course of events—the latter setting up a connection with the "apocalyptic" theme. This imaginative backdrop remains discernible in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, which draws upon it to perhaps unexpected effect in achieving a dialectical balance between the motifs of order and breakdown.
Although social scientists have been devoted to discovering specific realities of social life, many theorists devoted to critical judgment have turned to philosophy in search of universal grounds of truth and reality. They have, however, worried about the problem of relativism. Although Wittgenstein has often been characterized as a relativist, Cora Diamond, inspired by G. E. M Anscombe, argues that his work, despite internal tensions, provides rational grounds for external criticism of social practices. Her argument and her critique of the work of Peter Winch and Ilham Dilman are, however, neither adequately supported by Wittgenstein’s texts nor sufficiently developed on their own terms.
Although sociologists conceive obligation as an objective force (the social) that compels individuals to act and think according to pre-defined norms of conduct and ways of reasoning, philosophers view it as an imperative that is met through the agent’s deliberation. The aim of this article is to undermine the standard dichotomy between the deterministically sociological and the moral–philosophical views of obligation by way of contending that Wittgenstein’s view on blind obedience (as analyzed by Meredith Williams) bears a conception of the social. I will then argue that Wittgenstein’s notion of forms of life and the sociological notion of situation refer to the same encompassing phenomenon: obligation. I will finally claim that this phenomenon should be re-specified in terms of impersonality to devise a shared dynamic conception of obligation admitting that a plurality of contextual normative orders monitor collective and individual action in ordinary life.
This article argues, in opposition to a common interpretation of Wittgenstein deriving from Winch, that there is nothing especially problematic about the social sciences. Familiar Wittgensteinian theses about language, notably on the open-endedness of linguistic rules and on the importance of family resemblance concepts, have great relevance not only to the social sciences but also to much of the natural sciences. The differences between scientific and ordinary language are much less sharp than Winch, and probably Wittgenstein, supposed.
In recent decades, a number of authors have relied on the multiple realizability argument to reject methodological individualism. In this article, I argue that this strategy results in serious difficulties and makes it impossible to identify social entities and phenomena.
The fine arts are considered as one of several pathways toward insight, knowledge, and understanding. My reflections on this are deliberately not based on aesthetics or on philosophy of art. Speculations on fine art observe two characteristics of specific epistemic processes: first, a tacit knowledge that is not enunciated by ordinary language and, second, a present and effective logic, which has a different pattern from the logic of scientific knowledge. The latter leads to change because it is built upon accumulated knowledge, whereas in the arts, change leads to knowledge as creative processes guide us toward what we do not know, and this challenges what we do know.
Popper’s theory of World 3 is often regarded as incongruent with his defense of methodological individualism. This article criticizes this widespread view. Methodological individualism is said to be at odds with three crucial assumptions of the theory of World 3: (a) the impossibility of reducing World 3 to subjective mental states because it exists objectively, (b) the view that the mental functions cannot be explained by assuming that individuals are isolated atoms, and (c) the idea that World 3 has causal power and influences both individual minds and actions. This article demonstrates that the inconsistency thesis stems from a confusion between methodological individualism as understood by Popper and reductionism. The reasons for this confusion are analyzed and clarified. It is argued that two variants of methodological individualism can be distinguished, and that unlike psychologistic individualism, Popper’s nonatomistic individualism is fully consistent with his theory of World 3.
The article distinguishes between subjectivist and objectivist interpretations of scientific method, links subjectivism with good reasons, and argues its uselessness for our understanding of science. It applies the distinction to the method of falsification, explains why objectivism regards falsification to be conjectural, immune to the Duhem–Quine thesis, and immune to the problem of underdetermination. It confronts the falsifying mode of inference with the fallacy of begging the question and with the paradox of inference, and suggests how modus tollens helps scientists to find out that a tested theory is false, in spite of the fact that the falsity of the theory is asserted in its premises.
Shearmur argues for the importance of Popper’s ideas about World 3, and against the idea that they should be re-interpreted in social terms. However, he also argues for the importance of Popper’s ideas about methodological rules—and that these may be given a partially social interpretation. The content of our ideas may in consequence differ from what we take it to be, as a consequence of our institutions and practices operating as methodological rules. He also explores related ideas about the interplay between World 3 and social factors in connection with Darnton’s ideas about the book and work that has built on it, and related issues about the public sphere and the problem of effective deliberative feedback on public policy.
Even though social engineering has gained a bad reputation, due to new possibilities in the information age, it may be time to reconsider Karl Popper’s conception of "piecemeal social engineering." Piecemeal social engineering is not only an element within Popper’s open society. It also connects his political philosophy to his philosophy of science and his evolutionary epistemology. Furthermore, it seems to fit well into the search for implementation strategies for policies and social actions in the context of nonideal theory. Nevertheless, this does not necessarily undermine the need for political ideals and first-order principles, which are inhabitants of "World 3."
The early research of Karl Popper both in psychology and in philosophy of science is described; its basis for his later breakthroughs in the philosophy of science is explained. His debt to Otto Selz’s thought psychology is thereby detailed. Otto Selz’s philosophy of science is then explained, and its conflict with Popper’s early as well as his later views is portrayed. These studies of the conflicting views of Popper’s early views and Selz’s philosophy of science provide the basis for demonstrating the mistakes that Michel ter Hark has made in claiming that the alleged originality of Popper’s views occurred only in the 1970s and are little more than a rehash of Selz’s alleged evolutionary epistemology.
Polanyi analyzes the historical deployment of a "formal" economic science starting from the "market-scarcity-instrumental rationality triptych." This triptych, and the knowledge associated with it, is shown to be more than merely a "substantial" economic science’s interest in the triptych "need-nature-institution." While we must agree with Polanyi that economism is ill-suited to the first triptych, we hesitate to accept his suggested alternative, a heterogeneous mixture of naturalism and institutionalism, essentialism and historicism.
Expanding on recent philosophical contributions to the conceptual and normative framework of scientific imperialism, I examine whether the economics approach to social epistemology can be considered a case of economics imperialism and determine whether economics’ explanatory expansionism appropriately contributes to this philosophical subfield or not. I argue first that the economics approach to social epistemology counts as a case of economics imperialism under a broad conception of the term, and second that we have good reasons to doubt the appropriateness of the incursion of economics into social epistemology, insofar as economics’ attempt at explanatory unification fails to express significant human interests.
In this article, it is argued that Sellars’ view of normativity is the key for a proper resolution of the debate between normativism and anti-normativism, as the latter is described in Turner’s recent book Explaining the Normative. Drawing on an early Sellarsian article ("A Semantical Solution to the Mind-Body Problem"), I suggest that both normativism and anti-normativism (including Turner’s brand of the latter) are ultimately unsatisfactory positions and for the same reason: due to their failure to draw a distinction between causal or explanatory reducibility and logical or conceptual reducibility of the normative to the non-normative.
Existing economic models of prosociality have been rather silent in terms of proximate psychological mechanisms. We nevertheless identify the psychologically most informed accounts and offer a critical discussion of their hypotheses for the proximate psychological explanations. Based on convergent evidence from several fields of research, we argue that there nevertheless is a more plausible alternative proximate account available: the social motivation hypothesis. The hypothesis represents a more basic explanation of the appeal of prosocial behavior, which is in terms of anticipated social rewards. We also argue in favor of our own social motivation hypothesis over Robert Sugden’s fellow-feeling account (due originally to Adam Smith). We suggest that social motivation not only stands as a proximate account in its own right but also provides a plausible scaffold for other more sophisticated motivations (e.g., fellow-feelings). We conclude by discussing some possible implications of the social motivation hypothesis on existing modeling practice.
In "Redescription, Reduction, and Emergence: A Response to Tobias Hansson Wahlberg," Elder-Vass takes the opportunity to reply to my criticism of his theory in "Holism, Emergence, and the Crucial Distinction." In this response, I show how methodological individualists may respond to his argument against their position and I argue that Elder-Vass fails to provide reasons as to why his particular distinction between individualist and holist explanations should be adopted.
Mark Bevir raises the question of how genealogy, understood as a technique-based radical historicism, and the notion of the contingency of ideas, ground "critique." His problem is to avoid the relativism of radical historicism in a way that allows for "critique" without appealing to non-radical historicist absolutisms of the kind that ground the notion of false consciousness. He does so by appealing to the notion of motivated irrationality, which he claims avoids the problem of relativism and the problems of "false consciousness." The genealogies of Nietzsche and Foucault, however, do not ground "critique." The relevant normative judgments, of nobility in Nietzsche, for example, are presupposed.
This article argues that the credibility of both theoretical and empirical models in economics is best understood through their connection with the empirical aspects of the real world. The discussion herein demonstrates that the similarity between the model and the real world is not enough to justify a theoretical model’s explanatory power. The best way to secure the model’s credibility is to prove the existence of representation theorems.
Proponents of neuroeconomics often argue that better knowledge of the human neural architecture enables economists to improve standard models of choice. In their view, these improvements provide compelling reasons to use neural findings in constructing and evaluating economic models. In a recent article, I criticized this view by pointing to the trade-offs between the modeling desiderata valued by neuroeconomists and other economists, respectively. The present article complements my earlier critique by focusing on three modeling desiderata that figure prominently in economic and neuroeconomic modeling. For each desideratum, I examine findings that neuroeconomists deem to be especially relevant for economists and argue that neuroeconomists have failed to substantiate their calls to use these findings in constructing and evaluating economic models. In doing so, I identify methodological and evidential constraints that will continue to hinder neuroeconomists’ attempts to improve such models. Moreover, I draw on the literature on scientific modeling to advance the ongoing philosophical discussion regarding the prospects of interdisciplinary models of choice.
Social science studies often explain the emergence of collective beliefs by reference to factors that are supposed to be part of the social context. How do these macro-factors shape the beliefs of individuals? How can structural factors provide evidence supporting a given belief? In answering these questions, I propose a link connecting macro-factors and beliefs by introducing the notion of "evidential categorization." I expect to show that our structural explanations of beliefs often contain an analysis of the socially diffused systems of reasons—an important part of what we call the "epistemic context of belief-formation"—for they partially determine our evidential categorizations. Finally, I will show by an example, how structural explanations work if they include these components.
This article responds to Stephen Turner’s discussion of my article, "Historicism and Critique." I emphasize that radical historicism consists of substantive philosophical commitments. One commitment is to a historicized epistemology that presents objective knowledge as a product of a comparison between rival webs of belief. Another commitment is to a historical ontology that presents aggregate concepts in the social sciences as inherently pragmatic. These substantive commitments provide a plausible basis for various forms of critique. They lead to analyses of genealogical and ideological critique that differ from appeals to genealogy as a kind of groundless skepticism toward, and problematization of, all substantive commitments.
This paper argues that historicism can provide substantive philosophical grounds for critical theory and various modes of critique. Unlike the developmental historicism that dominated the nineteenth century, we start from a radical historicism tied to nominalism, contingency, and contestability. This radical historicism is compatible with a commitment to truth claims, including the truth of historicism and the truth of particular genealogies and other accounts of the world. Genealogy can be viewed as radical historicism in its critical guise, denaturalizing the ideas it targets. In addition, however, radical historicism provides possible grounds for both historical ontology and a revised version of ideology critique. Ideology is conceived here in relation to failures in consciousness itself rather than the alleged conflicts of a material base.
In this article, I clarify some of the key concepts and commitments of realist social ontology in economics. To do so, I make use of a recent critique of Lawson’s Reorienting Economics by Mohun and Veneziani. Their article provides a useful foil because responding to their critique allows us to emphasize that realism’s claims are more conditional and less controversial than one might otherwise anticipate. The basic claim is that ontology matters and that explicit recognition and consideration of ontological issues can be beneficial. However, developing a focus on ontology can create problems of interpretation among economists regarding what is being claimed and offered. I discuss some of these with reference to an adaption of Maki’s concept of economics imperialism and also with reference to Mary Morgan’s recent typology of experiments.
Participatory methods in anthropology and other fields of cultural research aim at turning informants into collaborators or co-authors. Researchers generally accept the idea of different knowledge systems and continue the practice of avoiding the critical appraisal of alien systems that is common in ethnography. However, if informants are to be treated as collaborators, or ideally as colleagues, they become effectively a part of the research community. Helen Longino has formulated criteria according to which the objectivity of research communities can be evaluated. These criteria rest heavily on the idea of effective peer criticism, and require appraisal of the reasoning and background assumptions of all members of the community. Avoiding the appraisal of alien knowledge systems is problematic when the alleged systems of the researcher and the researched are in constant contact.
One of the strikingly iconoclastic features of actor-network theory is its juxtaposition of the claim to be a realist perspective with denials that supposedly natural phenomena existed before scientists "made them up." This paper explains and criticizes such arguments in the work of Bruno Latour. By combining referent and reference in the concept of assemblages, Latour provides a superficially viable way to reconcile these apparently incompatible claims. This paper will argue, however, that this conflation of referent and reference leads Latour’s ontology into difficulties that can only be resolved by abandoning it in favor of a more conventional—critical—realism.
Martin Paleček and Mark Risjord have recently put forward a critical evaluation of the ontological turn in anthropological theory. According to this philosophically informed theory of ethnographic practice, certain insights of twentieth-century analytic philosophy should play a part in the methodological debates concerning anthropological fieldwork: most importantly, the denial of representationalism and the acceptance of the extended mind thesis. In this paper, I will attempt to evaluate the advantages and potential drawbacks of ontological anthropology—arguing that to become a true alternative to current social scientific thinking about methodology, it has to meet certain philosophical objections.
This article attempts to evidence the idea that progress in social theory is impeded by central theoretical procedures embodying a host of conceptual mistakes. The article focuses on realist theorizing, examining both early realist work on science and contemporary critical realism, and demonstrates how conceptual procedures employed therein lead to error and confusion. The standard use of these procedures entails, among other things, that social theoretical debates tend to remain irresolvable and that understanding of what it takes to demonstrate a theoretical scheme as superior remains poor. Alternative ways of proceeding are outlined, which lead to defensible social theoretical practice.
The aim of John Searle’s philosophy of society is to provide a foundation for the social sciences. Arguing that the study of social reality needs to be based on a philosophy of language, Searle claims that sociology has little to offer since no sociologist ever took language seriously. Attacking Durkheim head-on, Searle not only claims that Durkheim’s project differs from his own but also that Durkheim’s sociology has serious shortcomings. Opposing Searle, this paper argues that Durkheim’s account of social reality is still viable and that Searle’s attack backfires on his own theoretical project.
Dorothy Emmet, in two books, one of which was based on extensive personal contact with Robert Merton and Columbia sociology, provides the closest thing we have to an authorized philosophical defense of Merton. It features a deflationary account of functionalism which dispenses with the idea of general teleological ends. What it replaces it with is an account of "structures" that have various consequences and that are maintained because, on Emmet’s account, of the mutual reinforcement of motives produced by the structure.
We present an inferentialist account of collective rationality and intentionality, according to which beliefs and other intentional states are understood in terms of the normative statuses attributed to, and undertaken by, the participants of a discursive practice—namely, their discursive or practical commitments and entitlements. Although these statuses are instituted by the performances and attitudes of the agents, they are not identified with any physical or psychological entity, process or relation. Therefore, we argue that inferentialism allows us to talk of collective intentionality and agency without needing to posit the existence of any sort of collective psychology or mind.
In Elder-Vass’s response to my critical discussion of his social ontology, it is maintained (1) that a social object is not identical with but is merely composed of its suitably interrelated parts, (2) that a social object is necessarily indistinguishable in terms of its causal capacities from its interrelated parts, and (3) that ontological individualism lacks an adequate ontological justification. In this reply, I argue that in view of (1) the so-called redescription principle defended by Elder-Vass ought to be reformulated and renamed; that the conjunction of (1) and (2) renders social objects causally redundant; and that ontological individualism can be coherently formulated and theoretically justified within Elder-Vass’s own metaphysics of objects with causal powers.
In response to Hansson Wahlberg, this paper argues, first, that he misunderstands the redescription principle developed in my book The Causal Power of Social Structures, and second, that his criticisms rest on an ontological individualism that is taken for granted but in fact lacks an adequate ontological justification of its own.
Drawing general inferences on the basis of single-case and small-n studies is often seen as problematic. This article suggests a logic of generalization based on thinly rationalistic social mechanisms. Ideal-type mechanisms can be derived from empirical observations in one case and, based on the assumption of thin rationality, used as a generalizing bridge to other contexts with similar actor constellations. Thus, the "portability" builds on expectations about similar mechanisms operating in similar contexts. We present the general logic behind such "rationalistic generalization" and relate it to other ideas about generalization from single-case studies.
Paul Roth claims that "interpretivists" in the philosophy of social sciences like Charles Taylor assume a positivist caricature of natural science to motivate their arguments against naturalism in the social sciences. Roth argues that not only is adopting the view of meaning relied upon by those he sometimes refers to as the "friends of understanding" unmotivated once the critique of positivism has been taken on board, he argues further that Quine has shown why this "meaning realism" is unavailable in principle. Roth bolsters his use of Quine against interpretivists by referring to Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein on rule-following. But McDowell has shown how Kripke overlooks an alternative reading of those remarks, which provides "interpretivists" with arguments against mainstream naturalism and which makes no use of anything resembling "meaning realism." This opening for interpretivists is actually already present in Roth’s discussion of the distinction between "thin" and "thick" description. This suggests how mainstream naturalism itself might be rethought to accommodate interpretivism.
In this review essay, I examine the central tenets of sociologist Dave Elder-Vass’s recent contribution to social ontology, as put forth in his book The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency. Elder-Vass takes issue with ontological individualists and maintains that social structures exist and have causal powers in their own right. I argue that he fails to establish his main theses: he shows neither that social structures have causal powers "in their own right" (in any sense of this expression) nor that they exist.
The common assumption is that if a group comprising moral agents can act intentionally, as a group, then the group itself can also be properly regarded as a moral agent with respect to that action. I argue, however, that this common assumption is the result of a problematic line of reasoning I refer to as "the collective fallacy." Recognizing the collective fallacy as a fallacy allows us to see that if there are, in fact, irreducibly joint actors, then some of them will lack the full-fledged moral agency of their members. The descriptivist question of whether a group can perform irreducibly joint intentional action need not rise and fall with the normative question of whether a group can be a moral agent.
This paper discusses the so-called non-interference assumption (NIA) grounding causal inference in trials in both medicine and the social sciences. It states that for each participant in the experiment, the value of the potential outcome depends only upon whether she or he gets the treatment. Drawing on methodological discussion in clinical trials and laboratory experiments in economics, I defend the necessity of partial forms of blinding as a warrant of the NIA, to control the participants’ expectations and their strategic interactions with the experimenter.
Social scientists associate agent-based simulation (ABS) models with three ideas about explanation: they provide generative explanations, they are models of mechanisms, and they implement methodological individualism. In light of a philosophical account of explanation, we show that these ideas are not necessarily related and offer an account of the explanatory import of ABS models. We also argue that their bottom-up research strategy should be distinguished from methodological individualism.
The article makes four interrelated claims: (1) The mechanism approach to social explanation does not presuppose a commitment to the individual-level microfoundationalism. (2) The microfoundationalist requirement that explanatory social mechanisms should always consists of interacting individuals has given rise to problematic methodological biases in social research. (3) It is possible to specify a number of plausible candidates for social macro-mechanisms where interacting collective agents (e.g. formal organizations) form the core actors. (4) The distributed cognition perspective combined with organization studies could provide us with explanatory understanding of the emergent cognitive capacities of collective agents.
This article explores the characteristics of research sites that scientists have called "natural experiments" to understand and develop usable distinctions for the social sciences between "Nature’s or Society’s experiments" and "natural experiments." In this analysis, natural experiments emerge as the retro-fitting by social scientists of events that have happened in the social world into the traditional forms of field or randomized trial experiments. By contrast, "Society’s experiments" figure as events in the world that happen in circumstances that are already sufficiently "controlled" to be open for direct analysis without reconstruction work.
Recently, Dollimore criticized our claim that Organizational Ecology is not a Darwinian research program. She argued that Organizational Ecology is merely an incomplete Darwinian program and provided a suggestion as to how this incompleteness could be remedied. Here, we argue that Dollimore’s suggestion fails to remedy the principal problem that Organizational Ecology faces and that there are good reasons to think of the program as deeply incompatible with Darwinian thinking.
In the 1980s, there was a significant upsurge in diagnoses of Dissociative Identity Disorder. Ian Hacking suggests that the roots of this tendency lie in the excessive willingness of psychologists past and present to engage in the "psychologization of trauma." I argue that Hacking makes some philosophically problematic assumptions about the putative threat to human autonomy that is posed by the increasing availability, attractiveness, and plausibility of various forms of simulated experience. I also suggest how a different set of axiological and historical assumptions might have led to a less dismissive and possibly more plausible account of this diagnostic trend.
By taking the collective character of scientific research seriously, some philosophers have claimed that scientific knowledge is indeed collective knowledge. However, there is little clarity on what exactly is meant by collective knowledge. In this article, I argue that there are two notions of collective knowledge that have not been well distinguished: irreducibly collective knowledge (ICK) and jointly committed knowledge (JCK). The two notions provide different conditions under which it is justified to ascribe knowledge to a group. It is argued that ICK and JCK need to be approached independently, each of which can shed light on different aspects of science, knowledge production, and acceptance.
For almost half a century, the person most responsible for fomenting brouhahas regarding degrees of plasticity in the writing of histories has been Hayden White. Yet, despite the voluminous responses provoked by White’s work, almost no effort has been made to treat White’s writings in a systematic yet sympathetic way as a philosophy of history. Herman Paul’s book begins to remedy that lack and does so in a carefully considered and extremely scholarly fashion. In his relatively brief six chapters (plus an introduction), Paul packs a wealth of information. He convincingly demonstrates that a guiding theme of White’s work from earliest times has been that historians have no choice but to impose a structure on historical data and thus bear responsibility for structures so imposed. As such, a key philosophical question concerns on what bases White contends that a freedom of choice exists regarding forms given to recorded histories. This essay focuses on how Paul argues for a unified vision that answers this question, as well as how he offers an original and comprehensive conception of White’s writings.
Reydon and Scholz raise doubts about the Darwinian status of organizational ecology by arguing that Darwinian principles are not applicable to organizational populations. Although their critique of organizational ecology’s typological essentialism is correct, they go on to reject the Darwinian status of organizational populations. This paper claims that the replicator-interactor distinction raised in modern philosophy of biology but overlooked for discussion by Reydon and Scholz provides a way forward. It is possible to conceptualize evolving Darwinian populations providing that the inheritance mechanism is appropriately specified. By this approach, adaptation and selection are no longer dichotomized, and the evolutionary significance of knowledge transmission is highlighted.
Focusing on the production of lists of evaluative criteria has oversimplified our judgments of qualitative research. On the one hand, aspirations for global criteria applicable to "qualitative" or "interpretive" research have glossed over crucial analytic differences among specific types of inquiry. On the other hand, the methodological concern with appropriate ways of acquiring trustworthy data has led to an overly narrow proceduralism. I suggest that rational evaluations of analytic worth require the delineation of species of analytic tasks and the exercise of genre-appropriate judgments, to determine what constitutes explanatory, interpretive, or explicatory adequacy. I focus on the parameters of judgment for interpretations and explications because their analytic differences have not yet been made distinct in qualitative research.
Stephen T. Casper and Steve Fuller’s commentaries on my paper "Completing Circle of the Social Sciences? William Beveridge and Social Biology at the London School of Economics during the 1930s" raises important questions about the historical entanglement of the political left, welfarism, biology, and social science. In this response, I clarify questions about my analysis of events at the London School of Economics in the early twentieth century and identify ways in which they are important in the present. I suggest that there is much to be learned from the school’s failed experiment with social biology, not least when it comes to thinking about the historical contingency of relationships between progressive politics and biology.
Much has been written about the relationship between biology and social science during the early twentieth century. However, discussion is often drawn toward a particular conception of eugenics, which tends to obscure our understanding of not only the wide range of intersections between biology and social science during the period but also their impact on subsequent developments. This paper draws attention to one of those intersections: the British economist and social reformer William Beveridge’s controversial efforts to establish a Department of Social Biology at London School of Economics during the 1920s and 1930s. Featuring a fully equipped laboratory headed by a leading geneticist, the Department of Social Biology was Beveridge’s attempt to "cross-fertilise" biology and social science and, in so doing, take the ideological heat out of social scientific, in particular economic, methods of investigation. Exploring why Beveridge’s project failed and throwing light on its long-term legacies, this paper considers what we can learn from the short-lived Department of Social Biology.
Why would anyone want there to be natural foundations for the social sciences? In a provocative essay exploring precisely that question, historian Chris Renwick uses an interwar debate featuring William Beveridge, Lancelot Hogben, and Friedrich Hayek to begin to imagine what might have been had such a program calling for biological knowledge to form the natural bases of the social sciences been realized at the London School of Economics. Yet perhaps Renwick grants too much attention to differences and "what-ifs" and not enough to the historical question of "what happened" afterward. "Chickens and Eggs" offers an alternative view of this rather vexed question—one grounded in what happened, which suggests that Renwick’s concerns may be somewhat misplaced.
Chris Renwick’s recent research into the fate of William Beveridge’s attempt to establish social biology as the foundational social science at the London School of Economics is history at its best by uncovering a moment in the past when decisions were taken comparable to ones being taken today. In this case, the issues concern the political and scientific foundations of the welfare state. By connecting Beveridge’s original reasoning to recruit Lancelot Hogben for the Rockefeller-sponsored social biology chair with his later formative role in the design of the British welfare state, we are able to witness an alternative vision of the left, one associated with the Fabian movement, which proceeded independently of its Marxist cousin. The Fabian focus on taxing "inheritance" in the broadest sense remains relevant to how we think about the human condition in an era when capitalism has come to encompass the ownership of genetic material.
The overall aim of this two-part paper is to provide a supplement to ability theories of practice in terms of a defense of the following thesis: Individuals’ ability to act appropriately sometimes depends on their exercise of the ability directly to perceive normative states. In part I, I presented the account of direct perception. In this part II, I argue that, by the lights of this account, normative states are sometimes directly perceptible. Also, I show that the ability directly to perceive normative states is a commonly possessed—and exercised—ability. On this basis, I establish the conclusion that, in situations of social interaction, individuals’ ability to act appropriately is sometimes underwritten by their exercise of the ability directly to perceive normative states. By way of ending, I briefly explain the different ways in which my discussion constitutes both a useful supplement to ability theories of practice and a reply to an important objection raised against these theories.
This article scrutinizes some theoretical procedures prevalent in the philosophy of social science. These procedures are exemplified in Elder-Vass’s critical realism, which promises to place the social sciences on a sound ontological footing. The article focuses on the way that Elder-Vass’s general emergentist ontology is constituted and on the methods through which it is applied to society. It is contended that the ontology is not and could not be grounded in science and that its philosophical use distorts what it is applied to. The incoherent methods that social ontological projects constitutionally rely on entail that they cannot ground social scientific explanation.
This paper evaluates Nancy Cartwright’s critique of economic models. Cartwright argues that economics fails to build relevant "nomological machines" able to isolate capacities. In this paper, I contend that many economic models are not used as nomological machines. I give some evidence for this claim and build on an inferential and pragmatic approach to economic modeling. Modeling in economics responds to peculiar inferential norms where a "good" model is essentially a model that enhances our knowledge about possible worlds. As a consequence, models and experiments are very different knowledge-producing devices, at least in economics.
In this paper, I provide a critical examination of Warren Schmaus’s recently systematized "functionalist" approach to the study of collective representations. I examine both the logical and the conceptual viability of Schmaus’s brand of "functionalism" and the relation between his rational reconstruction and philosophical critique of Durkheim and the latter’s original set of proposals. I conclude that, due to its reliance on certain problematic philosophical theses, Schmaus’s functionalism ultimately falls short of providing a coherent alternative to the Durkhemian position or serving as a useful starting point from which to understand the origins of abstract categories in concrete experience.
Most definitions of cooperation provide sufficient but not necessary conditions. This paper describes a form of minimal cooperation, corresponding to mass actions implying many agents, such as demonstrations. It characterizes its intentional, epistemic, strategic, and teleological aspects, mostly obtained from weakening classical concepts. The rationality of minimal cooperation turns out to be part of its definition, whereas it is usually considered as an optional though desirable feature. Game-theoretic concepts thus play an important role in its definition. The paper concludes by answering concrete questions about what should and should not be called cooperation.
In this volume, the authors seek to analyze the actual influence of Dilthey’s philosophy of the human sciences on various contemporary debates. They are convinced that Dilthey’s interpretative-holistic epistemology provides a good starting point for engaging with alternative conceptions of the human sciences. Throughout the volume, the authors illustrate the importance of Dilthey’s main concepts for constituting the human-scientific objects of inquiry qua historically contextualized objects of inquiry. It is the interpretative reflection on the forms of human beings’ self-understanding of their situatedness that requires the implementation of double hermeneutics in the constitution of such objects. In my review, I concentrate chiefly on five versions of double hermeneutics discussed by the authors in different methodological contexts.
Jean Piaget, along with Sigmund Freud and B. F. Skinner, is one of the most influential thinkers in psychology. His influence on developmental and cognitive psychology, pedagogy and the so-called cognitive revolution is without doubt. The contributors to the book under review aim to show his past, contemporary as well as future relevance to important areas of psychology. I argue that they fail because they use Piaget’s own terminology, instead of explaining his ideas and relevance in a way accessible to someone not already familiar with or sceptical about his assumptions and ideas. Thus, the book neither meets the authors’ own stated goals, nor provides an accessible exposition of Piaget for the uninitiated or sceptical reader. A companion book like this one should help give answers to questions which someone unfamiliar with or sceptical of, but curious about, Piaget’s work would ask.
The overall aim of this two-part article is to provide a supplement to ability theories of practice in terms of a defense of the following thesis: In situations of social interaction, individuals’ ability to act appropriately sometimes depends on their exercise of the ability directly to perceive normative states. In this Part I, I introduce ability theories of practice and motivate my thesis. Furthermore, I offer an analysis of normative states as response-dependent properties. Last, I work out and defend an account of direct perception that is compatible with individuals being able directly to perceive various everyday phenomena. Drawing on this account, I show in part II, that normative states are sometimes directly perceptible too.
Derek Parfit’s long-awaited work On What Matters is a very ambitious, very strange production seeking to defend both a nonreductive and nonnaturalistic but nonmetaphysical and nonontological form of cognitive intuitionism or rationalism and an ethical theory (the Triple Theory) reflecting the convergence of Kantian universalizability, Scanlonian contractualism, and rule utilitarianism. Critics have already countered that Parfit’s metaethics is unbelievable and his convergence thesis unconvincing, but On What Matters is a truly Sidgwickian work, the implications of which largely remain to be worked out. Parfit does not go far enough in spelling out exactly what matters and why, what normative reasons we actually have, and where we should go from here, if we take him seriously.
In an effort to carve a distinct place for social facts without lapsing into a holistic ontology, John Greenwood has sought to define social phenomena solely in terms of the attitudes held by the actor(s) in question. I argue that his proposal allows for the possibility of a "lone collectivity" that is (1) unpalatable in its own right and (2) incompatible with the claim that sociology is autonomous from psychology. As such, I conclude that the relevant beliefs need to be held by more than one person.
In this article, I articulate and defend an account of corporations motivated by John Searle’s discussion of them in his Making the Social World. According to this account, corporations are abstract entities that are the products of status function Declarations. They are also connected with, though not reducible to, various people and certain of the power relations among them. Moreover, these connections are responsible for corporations having features that stereotypical abstract entities lack (e.g., the abilities to take actions and make profits).
Karl Popper and Friedrich von Hayek became close friends soon after they first met
in the early 1930s. Ever since, they discussed their ideas intensively on many occasions.
But even though an analysis of the origins and contents of their ideas and
correspondence reveals a number of important and fundamental differences, they rarely
criticize each other in their published work. The article analyzes in particular the
different ideas they have on the role of reason in society and on rationalism and the
roots of these differences. Popper’s "Towards a Rational Theory of
Tradition" of 1948 contains a criticism of Hayek’s idea—published,
for instance, in "Individualism: True and False" of 1945—that we
must accept tradition without trying to change it. An analysis of the differences
between the two authors touches on topics such as the possibility of public intervention
in society, the role of social science in this, the methodology of social science, and the
differences between liberalism and social democracy. The article concludes with some
possible explanations for Popper and Hayek downplaying their differences in public. The
fact remains that they never resolved the tension between Popper’s critical
rationalism and Hayek’s conservative rationalism.
This article attempts to assess Mario Bunge’s important but widely neglected criticisms of dialectics. It begins by providing a contextualized interpretation of Friedrich Engels’s metaphysics of the dialectics of nature before embarking on a detailed discussion of Leon Trotsky’s and contemporary "dialectical" scientists’ views on materialist dialectics. It argues that while some of Bunge’s criticisms are eminently sensible, the principles underlying the works of dialectical scientists are compatible with Bunge’s emergentist and systemic approach and can shed light on such issues as the levels of organization, the diachronic and synchronic aspects of emergence, and the individualism-holism-systemism trilemma. This article also submits that dialectics is best interpreted as a guideline for a philosophy of change instead of a magical wand that liberates the investigator from study of facts. Understood as something that serves heuristic purposes, dialectics can be sensibly utilized by scientists to shore up or refine their methodological principles and thereby to facilitate empirical research.
Shankman holds that Derek Freeman "trashed" Margaret Mead’s reputation as a public intellectual by portraying her as a naïve and gullible anthropologist who perpetrated a serious error about adolescence in American Samoa. Shankman concedes that Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa was factually in error but argues that her reputation in anthropology did not rest on it but rather on her extensive works on other societies. Ostensibly about Samoa, her book was rather a critique of American society and should be judged as such. It is unjust that its factual errors undermine her status as a public intellectual. Fieldwork method and the lingering influence of inductivism are shown to underlie the controversy.
It is well known that Ernest Gellner made substantial use of his knowledge of the social sciences in philosophy. Here I discuss how he used it on the basis of a few examples taken from Gellner’s philosophical output. It is argued that he made a number of highly original "translations", orre-interpretations, of philosophical theories and problems using his knowledge of the social sciences. While this method is endorsed, it is also argued that some of Gellner’s translations crossed the line between the original and the idiosyncratic.
Institutions are normative social structures that are collectively accepted. In his book Making the Social World, John R. Searle maintains that these social structures are created and maintained by Status Function Declarations. The article’s author criticizes this claim and argues, first, that Searle overestimates the role that language plays in relation to institutions and, second, that Searle’s notion of a Status Function Declaration confuses more than it enlightens. The distinction is exposed between regulative and constitutive rules as being primarily a linguistic one: whereas deontic powers figure explicitly in regulative rules, they feature only implicitly in constitutive rules. Furthermore, he contends that Searle’s collective acceptance account of human rights cannot adequately account for the fact that people have these rights even when they are not recognized. Finally, It is argued that a conception of collective intentionality that involves collective commitment is needed in order to do justice to the normative dimension of institutions.