Philosophy of Social Science, Misc

Introduction to Karl Popper's philosophy of science.

This article serves as either an addendum or as an expansion of ideas and work developed in my 2023 book, The Rationality Project: Across the Millennia, issued by Palgrave Macmillan. The book explores 21 potential theories for explaining rationality in terms of why and how one among these can serve in the position of explanatory power. The book does not fully explain all of these candidate theories, assigning that complete role to this addendum or work-in-progress. The main reason for this (...) abbreviation in assessing all the theories in the book is that the complete coverage—which this addendum allows—of all 21 theories would become too detailed for some philosophical readers. This addendum; one may consider, is then for the more technically minded reader—although certainly not-too-technically minded readers are welcome to explore it. If it becomes too bogged in detail for those latter kinds of readers, they may end up skimming the material in this addendum, trying at least to get the general idea of how these addendum sections fit into the book”s goals. (shrink)

The broadening of society—the warm embracing of those who were once excluded—is a beautiful process. Throughout the last half-century society has progressed in ways utterly unfathomable to our not-so-distant ancestors. Yet, the basis on which contemporary societal enrichment now stands—the development and solidification of identity—is not exempt from critique. Within this paper I contend that the conceptual grounding of our contemporary obsession with identity is untenable. It is not the fact that various social “identities” are empowered that is dangerous, rather, (...) it is the polarization between the various identities and the peculiar dynamic that arises that proves problematic. I begin by drawing attention to some problematic conceptions and logical issues within the process of societal-identity dynamic. Additionally, a new conceptual notion, “the gulf of identity” is broached, and I discuss its composition and how it relates to the Rawlsian “veil of ignorance”. To conclude, I broach a possible restructuring of this framework, modifying it in hopes that it better accommodates all groups, discussing the popular issue of “toleration of the intolerant” along the way. (shrink)

Today, when reading about multicollinearity – one of the most dreaded problems in regression analysis, I came across the statement of Blanchard [8]: “Multicollinearity is God’s will, not a problem with OLS or statistical techniques in general.” Immediately, I thought: “If it is really God’s will, we should keep the problem within our grasp, but not rely on God.”.

To date, hundreds of researchers have employed the method of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) for the purpose of causal inference. In a recent series of simulation studies, however, several authors have questioned the correctness of QCA in this connection. Some prominent representatives of the method have replied in turn that simulations with artificial data are unsuited for assessing QCA. We take issue with either position in this impasse. On the one hand, we argue that data-driven evaluations of the correctness of (...) a procedure of causal inference require artificial data. On the other hand, we prove all previous attempts in this direction to have been defective. For the first time in the literature on configurational comparative methods, we lay out a set of formal criteria for an adequate evaluation of QCA before implementing a battery of inverse-search trials to test how this method performs in different recovery contexts according to these criteria. While our results indicate that QCA is correct when generating the parsimonious solution type, they also demonstrate that the method is incorrect when generating the conservative and intermediate solution type. In consequence, researchers using QCA for causal inference, particularly in human-sensitive areas such as public health and medicine, should immediately discontinue employing the method’s conservative and intermediate search strategies. (shrink)

Addicts are often portrayed as compelled by their addiction and thus as a paradigm of unfree action and mitigated blame. This chapter argues that our best scientific theories of addiction reveal that, psychologically, addicts are not categorically different from non-addicts. There is no pairing of contemporary accounts of addiction and of prominent theories of moral responsibility that can justify our intuitions about the mitigation of addicts but not non-addicts. Two conclusions are advanced. First, we should either treat addicts as we (...) normally treat non-addicts (as fully culpable) or embrace the skeptical conclusion that everyone is less responsible than we thought—perhaps not responsible at all. Second, we should be doubtful that theorizing about responsibility will be advanced by focusing on particular kinds of psychopathologies. (shrink)

It is an open question whether well-being ought to primarily be understood as a temporal concept or whether it only makes sense to talk about a person’s well-being over their whole lifetime. In this article, I argue that how this principled philosophical disagreement is settled does not have substantive practical implications for well-being science and well-being policy. Trying to measure lifetime well-being directly is extremely challenging as well as unhelpful for guiding well-being public policy, while temporal well-being is both an (...) adequate indirect measure of lifetime well-being, and an adequate focus for the purposes of improving well-being through public policy. Consequently, even if what we ought to care about is lifetime well-being, we should use temporal measures of well-being and focus on temporal well-being policies. (shrink)

Collective memory researchers predominantly in the cultural and social sciences have commonly understood the concept of collective memory as a mere metaphor, as something not existing in itself as memory but useful only as a tool for referring to the way groups construct shared representations of their past. Few have however addressed the question of whether it is a metaphor or literal in its own right. This paper looks at the plausibility of the claim that collective memory is a mere (...) metaphor by probing its presuppositions, where the representationalist theory of mind emerges as the ground for such a claim. Then appealing to the externalist model of the mind championed in recent studies of mind in disciplines as varied as philosophy, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and collective intentionality studies, we try to expose the presuppositions of that claim, opening up possibilities for conceiving collective memory as not merely metaphorical but literal and naturally existing as memory. (shrink)

This paper argues that ethical propositions can legitimately be used as evidence for and against empirical conclusions. Specifically, I argue that this thesis is entailed by several uncontroversial assumptions about ethical metaphysics and epistemology. I also outline several examples of ethical-to-empirical inferences where it is extremely plausible that one can rationally rely upon their ethical evidence in order to gain a justified belief in an empirical conclusion. The main upshot is that ethical propositions can, under perfectly standard conditions, play both (...) direct and indirect evidential roles in (social) scientific inquiry. (shrink)

The presented Research Topic explores the potential of citizen science to contribute to the development of social innovations. It sets the ground for analysis of mutual relations between two strong and embedded in the literature concepts: citizen science and social innovation. Simultaneously, the collection opens a discussion on how these two ideas are intertwined, what are the significant barriers, and the need to use citizen science for social innovation.

In recent years, the practice of tax exemption for churches has become a source of open scrutiny, argument, and controversy on the part of both government and religious leaders. The study attempted to assess the main principles that government base on to impose taxes on its citizenry and to assess the tax exemption status of the churches in Ghana. Exploratory, descriptive and cross-section surveys were used to investigate and discover from respondent’s information on the topic to provide a report on (...) the background, facts, settings and concerns about the principles of taxation and the tax exemption status of churches. The study considered 120 people as its targeted sample of which 114 responded by the use of questionnaires. Also, descriptive analysis such as frequency and percentages were used to analyse the data. From the information gathered on the research, it was revealed that most Ghanaians representing 65.8% prefer the government to allocate taxes based on the benefits that taxpayers receive for paying taxes rather than the ability to pay or any other principle for the allocation of taxes. In addition, 57% of Ghanaians would like the religious organizations to enjoy their tax-exempt status despite allegation by critics that they are amassing wealth for themselves and not contributing to the development of Ghana. Some of the reasons given were that: churches are not profit-making businesses; churches contribute to the development of the nation; churches care for the people more than the government. Some of them concluded that failure to grant the church tax exemption may give room for the churches to engage in business activities. For those with the opposing view, some gave reasons such as: churches have become some sort of commerce; the churches have more money in this world; the payment of taxes by churches may as well boost the revenue of the government. Despite the various arguments, there was an agreement that the Ghana Revenue Authority should check the sales of rosaries, anointing oil, holy water, charge of consultation fees, as these should attract taxation. The paper recommends that Tax-Exempt Division should develop policies and administer tax exempt organizations (including religious organizations) laws. The division should be responsible for exempt organizations tax education and training to enable them understand their tax law obligations. This will improve tax compliance by the exempt organizations. (shrink)

"Correlation is not causation" is one of the mantras of the sciences—a cautionary warning especially to fields like epidemiology and pharmacology where the seduction of compelling correlations naturally leads to causal hypotheses. The standard view from the epistemology of causation is that to tell whether one correlated variable is causing the other, one needs to intervene on the system—the best sort of intervention being a trial that is both randomized and controlled. In this paper, we argue that some purely correlational (...) data contains information that allows us to draw causal inferences: statistical noise. Methods for extracting causal knowledge from noise provide us with an alternative to randomized controlled trials that allows us to reach causal conclusions from purely correlational data. (shrink)

According to the mainstream narrative about race, all groups have the same innate dispositions and potential, and all disparities—at least those favoring whites—are due to past or present racism. Some people who reject this narrative gravitate toward an alternative, anti-Jewish narrative, which sees recent history in terms of a Jewish/gentile conflict. The most sophisticated promoter of the anti-Jewish narrative is the evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald. MacDonald argues that Jews have a suite of genetic adaptations—including high intelligence and ethnocentrism—and cultural practices (...) that lead them to undermine gentile society to advance their own evolutionary interests. He says that Jewish-designed intellectual movements have weakened gentile identity and culture while preserving Jewish identity and separatism. Cofnas recently argued that MacDonald’s theory is based on “systematically misrepresented sources and cherry-picked facts.” However, Cofnas gave short shrift to at least three key claims: Jews are highly ethnocentric, liberal Jews hypocritically advocate liberal multiculturalism for gentiles/gentile countries but racial purity and separatism for Jews/Israel, and Jews are responsible for liberalism and mass immigration to the United States. The present paper examines these claims and concludes that MacDonald’s views are not supported. (shrink)

Despite their many virtues, democracies suffer from well-known problems with high levels of voter ignorance. Such ignorance, one might think, leads democracies to occasionally produce bad outcomes. Proponents of epistocracy claim that allocating comparatively greater amounts of political power to citizens who possess more politically relevant knowledge may help us to mitigate the bad effects of voter ignorance. An important challenge to epistocracy rejects the claim that we can reliably identify a subset of citizens who possess more politically relevant knowledge (...) than others. Roughly put, such knowledge should involve knowledge of various politically relevant social-scientific facts. But since the social sciences are mired in controversy, it’s not clear what the politically relevant facts are. Accordingly, we cannot definitively say of some citizens that they possess more politically relevant knowledge than others. Call this the Argument from Political Disagreement. In this paper I respond to the Argument from Political Disagreement. First, I argue that it conflates social-scientific knowledge with politically relevant knowledge. Even if there were no uncontroversial social-scientific knowledge, there is much uncontroversial politically relevant knowledge. Second, I establish the importance of such non-social-scientific knowledge for political decision-making. I conclude that this knowledge constitutes the minimal body of knowledge which epistocrats need to make their case. (shrink)

Humanity faces two fundamental problems of learning: learning about the universe, and learning to become civilized. We have solved the first problem, but not the second one, and that puts us in a situation of great danger. Almost all of our global problems have arisen as a result. It has become a matter of extreme urgency to solve the second problem. The key to this is to learn from our solution to the first problem how to solve the second one. (...) This was the basic idea of the 18th century Enlightenment, but in implementing this idea, the Enlightenment blundered. Their mistakes are still built into academia today. In order to le arn how to create a civilized, enlightened world, the key thing we need to do is to cure academia of the structural blunders we have inherited from the Enlightenment. We need to bring about a revolution in science, and in academia more broadly so that the basic aim becomes wisdom, and not just knowledge. (shrink)

This study assessed the professional variables of academic staff in African varsities and their readiness to Utilise Internet-Based Channels for Research Communication in an era of Covid-19. Drawing from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory, the study was guided by four null hypotheses. The quantitative research method based on the virtual cross-sectional survey design was adopted. A total of 8,591 academics in African universities were the targeted demographic of this study. However, data were collected from a virtual snowball sample of 1,977 (...) respondents (males, N = 1347; females, N = 630) from 24 African countries. A validated electronic survey, with three major aspects, was employed for data collection. The e-survey was released on the Association of African Universities' Telegram forum, which includes 1,622 participants from diverse African nations and regions. Members of the forum, who are all academics, were invited to complete the survey and publish it on their universities' internet-based forums. Coded data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics such as the Kruskal Wallis Non-parametric test. The non-parametric test was used because the data failed to meet the normality assumptions required to perform a parametric test. Results indicated, amongst others, that there are considerable variances in staff preparedness to use internet-based channels for research communication based on their educational credentials, educational qualification, rank and areas of research interest. According to the survey, academics with a doctoral degree; grade II lecturers; staff with 3 to 6 years of service; and staff in the medical sciences demonstrated a higher propensity of readiness to use internet-based channels for research communication. Based on these findings key theoretical, practical and research implications are discussed. (shrink)

There are presently two approaches to the study of well-being. Philosophers typically focus on normative theorizing, attempting to identify the things that are ultimately good for a person, while largely ignoring empirical research. The idea is that empirical attention cannot be directed to the right place without a rigorous theory. Meanwhile, social scientists typically focus on empirical research, attempting to identify the causes and consequences of well-being, while largely ignoring normative theorizing. The idea is that conceptual and theoretical clarity will (...) come with time and more data. This paper argues that neither is a good approach to the study of well-being. The traditional philosophical approach underappreciates the vital importance of empirical investigation, while the atheoretical empirical approach underappreciates the vital importance of normative theorizing. The proposed solution is to bring these methods together. Well-being research should be interdisciplinary. The paper proposes a “conceptual engineering” approach as a novel alternative. This approach involves an iterative process of normative theorizing, empirical investigation, and conceptual revision, with the aim of articulating concepts and theories of well-being that optimally suit particular interests and purposes. (shrink)

Strategies are mentioned across a variety of domains, from business ethics, to the philosophy of war, philosophy of sport, game theory, and others. However, despite their wide use, very little has been said about how to think about what strategies are or how they relate to other prominently discussed concepts. In this article, I probe the close connection between strategies and plans, which have been much more thoroughly characterized in the philosophy of action. After highlighting the challenges of analyzing strategies (...) in terms of plans, I show how the work done on the connection between plans and intentions can inspire further questions about the nature of strategy. I conclude by showing how one particular innovation in the understanding of plans—how they can be more or less partial—can be used to help us to mark what makes for a good strategy. (shrink)

Winner of the 2020 Essay Competition of the International Social Ontology Society. -/- Ian Hacking uses the looping effect to describe how classificatory practices in the human sciences interact with the classified people. While arguably this interaction renders the affected human kinds unstable and hence different from natural kinds, realists argue that also some prototypical natural kinds are interactive and human kinds in general are stable enough to support explanations and predictions. I defend a more fine-grained realist interpretation of interactive (...) human kinds by arguing for an explanatory domain account of the looping effect. First, I argue that knowledge of the feedback mechanisms that mediate the looping effect can supplement, and help to identify, the applicability domain over which a kind and its property variations are stably explainable. Second, by applying this account to cross-cultural case studies of psychiatric disorders, I distinguish between congruent feedback mechanisms that explain matches between classifications and kinds, and incongruent feedback mecha- nisms that explain mismatches. For example, congruent mechanisms maintain Western auditory experiences in schizophrenia, whereas exporting diagnostic labels inflicts incongruence by influencing local experiences. Knowledge of the mechanisms can strengthen explanatory domains, and thereby facilitate classificatory adjustments and possible interventions on psychiatric disorders. (shrink)

The central claim of the volume in which this chapter appears (*Fermented Landscapes*, ed. Colleen C. Myles, Univ. of Nebraska Press 2020) is that the chemical process of fermentation supplies an apt metaphor for understanding certain kinds of landscape change. The kinds of landscape change in question are, fortuitously, those often occasioned by commercial processes centered around fermentation itself: the commercial production of beer, wine, spirits, cider, cheese, and related fermented products. But what makes this metaphor apt? Which kinds of (...) landscape change are most fruitfully conceptualized as exhibiting “fermentation,” and how do they differ from other sorts of landscape change? What is it about fermentation-centered industries that effects fermentation-modeled landscape change, and when (if ever) do these industries contribute to other, different forms of landscape change? Is there any essential reason why fermentation-centered industries should create in their environs processes of transformation usefully characterized in terms of ferment? Or is this little more than a happy linguistic coincidence? In short: how much mileage do we get from this metaphor? This chapter offers a number of considerations germane to an evaluation of the “fermented landscapes” research paradigm—considerations to which readers may wish to remain alert as they study the contributions in this volume. (shrink)

John Searle, in several articles and books, has contended that institutions incorporating status functions with deontic powers are created by collective acceptance. I argue that collective acceptance can create new status functions with deontic powers only if other status functions with deontic powers already exist, so that collective acceptance can create new institutions only if other institutions are presupposed. So, the claim that institutions depend upon collective acceptance involves a vicious infinite regress. I provide an example to show how an (...) institution of slavery could be created by individual acceptances plus mutual belief about those acceptances. I consider whether an institution could be created by individual acceptances without mutual belief about those acceptances; but my conclusion is largely negative. I contend that the emergence of a new institution presupposes an existing institutional context and I explain how infinite regress can be avoided. (shrink)

Generating an account that can sidestep the disagreement among substantive theories of well-being, while at the same time still providing useful guidance for well-being public policy, would be a significant achievement. Unfortunately, the various attempts to remain agnostic regarding what constitutes well-being fail to either be an account of well-being, provide useful guidance for well-being policy, or avoid relying on a substantive well-being theory. There are no theory-free lunches in well-being policy. Instead, I propose an intermediate account, according to which (...) well-being is constituted by endorsed veridical experiences. This account refers back to theories of well-being but does so as agnostically as possible. An intermediate account of well-being is meant as a policy guiding compromise between the different theories of well-being that make claims regarding what constitutes well-being. An intermediate account does as well as can be hoped for in providing a basis for well-being policy. (shrink)

Evidence that humans play a dominant role in most ecosystems forces scientists to confront systems that contain factors transgressing traditional disciplinary boundaries. However, it is an open que...

I introduce an extension of the Lewis-Skyrms signaling game, analysed from a dynamical perspective via simple reinforcement learning. In Lewis’ (Convention, Blackwell, Oxford, 1969) conception of a signaling game, salience is offered as an explanation for how individuals may come to agree upon a linguistic convention. Skyrms (Signals: evolution, learning & information, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010a) offers a dynamic explanation of how signaling conventions might arise presupposing no salience whatsoever. The extension of the atomic signaling game examined here—which I (...) will refer to as a salience game—introduces a variable parameter into the atomic signaling game which allows for degrees of salience, thus filling in the continuum between Skyrms’ and Lewis’ models. The model does not presuppose any salience at the outset, but illustrates a process by which accidentally evolved salience is amplified, to the benefit of the players. It is shown that increasing degrees of salience allow populations to avoid sub-optimal pooling equilibria and to coordinate upon conventions more quickly. (shrink)

John Dewey and Ludwig Wittgenstein offer devastating critiques of the dominant model of human action that each inherited in their own time. Dewey, very early in his philosophical career, ostensibly put the stimulus–response mechanical understanding of action to rest with his “reflex-arc” concept article. Wittgenstein famously redescribed action as moves within language games that interconnect to constitute an interpretively open-ended form of life. In each case, these fundamental insights serve as heuristics, guiding our intellectual activity with regard to understanding our (...) practices, and as reminders in approaching problems. Several scholars have interpreted Dewey and Wittgenstein as allies in a grand project of... (shrink)

Reciprocity is ubiquitous in our lives, both as a way of rewarding and punishing others. Consequently, the social sciences have devoted many studies to this phenomenon. However, the concept of 'reciprocity' is quite polyvalent, and is used in many different ways across different disciplines - a situation potentially prone to equivocation, which hinders fruitful interdisciplinary work. At the same time, although philosophers often invoke 'reciprocity' in their work, there is a lack of conceptual clarification about what reciprocity actually means - (...) an eminently philosophical task. This thesis fills such a gap, by offering a general framework that allows us to understand how 'reciprocity' is used across different sciences. Such a framework consists in a grammar of the 4 uses/meanings of reciprocity: as a kind of exchange, of behaviour, of motivation, and of belief. Moreover, the thesis fills a second gap, regarding the correct interpretation of the psychological role of the reciprocity-motive in economic experiments. There has been a long-standing tradition in economics which overemphasizes the role of inequality aversion and downplays the role of reciprocity. Contrary to this deeply ingrained trend, I argue that reciprocity is the main motive of punishment of free-riders in the public goods game. My argument includes the first systematic critique of an experiment which is currently quite popular in behavioural economics. I show that the latter does not deserve the credit which it has received so far, and thus many economists need to revise their endorsement of inequality aversion. By offering a renewed interpretation of the motives in economic experiments, the thesis highlights reciprocity as a distinctive motivation. The thesis also offers tools to rethink key aspects of economic methodology, and proposes a distinction between prediction, explanation and rationalization of behaviour, in order to achieve psychologically realistic explanations of behaviour. The disciplinary home of the thesis is in philosophy of social science, economics and moral psychology. (shrink)

A view inherited from Max Weber states that purposive rational action, value rational action and affective action are three distinct types of social action that can compete, oppose, complement or substitute each other in social explanations. Contrary to this statement, I will defend the view that these do not constitute three different types of social actions, but that social actions always seem to concurrently involve rationality, normativity and affectivity. I show this by discussing the links between rational actions and consequentialism (...) and non-consequentialism, and by elaborating on certain major relationships between rationality, normativity and emotions. (shrink)

The provocative paper by John Forrester ‘If p, Then What? Thinking in Cases’ opened up the question of case thinking as a separate mode of reasoning in the sciences. Case-based reasoning is certainly endemic across a number of sciences, but it has looked different according to where it has been found. This article investigates this mode of science – namely thinking in cases – by questioning the different interpretations of ‘If p?’ and exploring the different interpretative responses of what follows (...) in ‘Then What?’. The aim is to characterize how ‘reasoning in, within, with, and from cases’ forms a mode of scientific investigation for single cases, for runs of cases, and for comparative cases, drawing on materials from a range of different fields in which case-based reasoning appears. (shrink)

Has the rise of data-intensive science, or ‘big data’, revolutionized our ability to predict? Does it imply a new priority for prediction over causal understanding, and a diminished role for theory and human experts? I examine four important cases where prediction is desirable: political elections, the weather, GDP, and the results of interventions suggested by economic experiments. These cases suggest caution. Although big data methods are indeed very useful sometimes, in this paper’s cases they improve predictions either limitedly or not (...) at all, and their prospects of doing so in the future are limited too. (shrink)

Evaluative claims and assumptions are ubiquitous in positive psychology. Some will deny this. But such disavowals are belied by the literature. Some will consider the presence of evaluative claims a problem and hope to root them out. But this is a mistake. If positive psychology is to live up to its raison d’être – to be the scientific study of the psychological components of human flourishing or well-being – it must make evaluative claims. Well-being consists in those things that are (...) good for us, that make life go well. Thus, one cannot investigate this topic without making claims about what is good for people and what they have reason to do. It’s time, therefore, to embrace the fact that positive psychology is value-laden. Doing so would benefit the field by allowing for more rigorous theorizing, and – perhaps counterintuitively – increasing the field’s objectivity. (shrink)

There is an under-appreciated tradition of genealogical explanation that is centrally concerned with social functions. I shall refer to it as the tradition of pragmatic genealogy. It runs from David Hume (T, 3.2.2) and the early Friedrich Nietzsche (TL) through E. J. Craig (1990, 1993) to Bernard Williams (2002) and Miranda Fricker (2007). These pragmatic genealogists start out with a description of an avowedly fictional “state of nature” and end up ascribing social functions to particular building blocks of our practices (...) – such as the fact that we use a certain concept, or live by a certain virtue – which we did not necessarily expect to have such a function at all. That the seemingly archaic device of a fictional state-of-nature story should be a helpful way to get at the functions of our actual practices must seem a mystifying proposal, however; I shall therefore endeavor to demystify it in what follows. My aim in this chapter is twofold. First, by delineating the framework of pragmatic genealogy and contrasting it with superficially similar methods, I argue that pragmatic genealogies are best interpreted as dynamic models whose point is to reveal the function – and non-coincidentally often the social function – of certain practices. Second, by buttressing this framework with something it notably lacks, namely an account of the type of functionality it operates with, I argue that both the type of functional commitment and the depth of factual obligation incurred by a pragmatic genealogy depend on what we use the method for: the dynamic models of pragmatic genealogy can be used merely as heuristic devices helping us spot functional patterns, or more ambitiously as arguments grounding our ascriptions of functionality to actual practices, or even more ambitiously as bases for functional explanations of the resilience or the persistence of practices. By bringing these distinctions into view, we gain the ability to distinguish strengths and weaknesses of the method’s application from strengths and weaknesses of the method itself. (shrink)

The rapidly growing transdisciplinary enthusiasm about developing new kinds of Anthropocene stories is based on the shared assumption that the Anthropocene predicament is best made sense of by narrative means. Against this assumption, this article argues that the challenge we are facing today does not merely lie in telling either scientific, socio-political, or entangled Anthropocene narratives to come to terms with our current condition. Instead, the challenge lies in coming to grips with how the stories we can tell in the (...) Anthropocene relate to the radical novelty of the Anthropocene condition about which no stories can be told. What we need to find are meaningful ways to reconcile an inherited commitment to narrativization and the collapse of storytelling as a vehicle of understanding the Anthropocene as our current predicament. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of how human science categories yield projectable inferences by critically examining Ron Mallon’s ‘social role’ account of human kinds. Mallon contends that human categories are projectable when a social role produces a homeostatic property cluster (HPC) kind. On this account, human categories are projectable when various social mechanisms stabilize and entrench those categories. Mallon’s analysis obscures a distinction between transitory and robust projectable inferences. I argue that the social kinds discussed by Mallon yield the former, (...) while classifications of biological kinds yield the latter. Classifications from psychiatry (‘schizophrenia,’ ‘hysteria’) are discussed as examples. (shrink)

Ingemar Nordin’s Using Knowledge: On the Rationality of Science, Technology, and Medicine is a critical rationalist examination of medicine as a social system, largely science-based, but including quackery. Thus rationality is limited, as befits the author’s fallibilism.

We identify several ongoing debates related to implicit measures, surveying prominent views and considerations in each debate. First, we summarize the debate regarding whether performance on implicit measures is explained by conscious or unconscious representations. Second, we discuss the cognitive structure of the operative constructs: are they associatively or propositionally structured? Third, we review debates whether performance on implicit measures reflects traits or states. Fourth, we discuss the question of whether a person’s performance on an implicit measure reflects characteristics of (...) the person who is taking the test or characteristics of the situation in which the person is taking the test. Finally, we survey the debate about the relationship between implicit measures and (other kinds of) behavior. (shrink)

This thesis studies the formation of rules of experience in Weberian methodology and its adequacy to scientific validation criteria. It was sought to investigate, in the first part of the work, a proposal of justification for the so-called eligibility criteria. It was also tried to explain the meaning used in this research of the term “reason”, which is based on the theoretical conception of the operative reason exposed by Newton da Costa. Again, with the help of the writings of the (...) same author, we have examined those, so named by him, pragmatic principles of scientific reason. The second section of this study presented the three eligibility criteria, namely: i) the difference between to be (sein) and to ought to be (sollen); ii) the possibility of subsumption of individual action; iii) the construction of concepts as ideal types. In the third part of this work, rationally correct action was justified as an anticipated conjecture for a reflexive operation. However, it was supported that there is a significant difference in relation to the rules of experience when applied for the construction of the agent’s actions and in their use for validating the imputation of causal links between social phenomena. In order to validate the results of the research, the rules of experience must be cleverly designed to be general propositions of the experiment, and for this, the characterization of these rules was based in the so-called “Fermi solution”. Subsequent to this methodological proposal, we pondered how the scientist conducts a thought experiment in the empirical sciences of action and the judgment of objective possibility as a counterfactual proposition was logically structured. Thus, we tried to demonstrate the logical structure of the validation mode of knowledge produced in the empirical sciences of action from Weberian pattern. (shrink)

Since Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), historians and philosophers of science have paid increasing attention to the implications of disciplinarity. In this chapter we consider restrictions posed to interdisciplinary exchange between ecology and economics that result from a particular kind of commitment to the ideal of disciplinary purity, that is, that each discipline is defined by an appropriate, unique set of objects, methods, theories, and aims. We argue that, when it comes to the objects of study in (...) ecology and economics, ideas of disciplinary purity have been underwritten by the artificial-natural distinction. We then problematize this distinction, and thus disciplinary purity, both conceptually and empirically. Conceptually, the distinction is no longer tenable. Empirically, recent interdisciplinary research has shown the epistemological and policy-oriented benefits of dealing with models which explicitly link anthropogenic (i.e., “artificial”) and non-anthropogenic factors (i.e., “natural”). We conclude that, in the current age of the Anthropocene, it is to be expected that without interdisciplinary exchange, ecology and economics may relinquish global relevance because the distinct and separate systems to which each “pure” science was originally made to apply will only diminish over time. (shrink)

This paper presents a systematic approach for analyzing and explaining the nature of social groups. I argue against prominent views that attempt to unify all social groups or to divide them into simple typologies. Instead I argue that social groups are enormously diverse, but show how we can investigate their natures nonetheless. I analyze social groups from a bottom-up perspective, constructing profiles of the metaphysical features of groups of specific kinds. We can characterize any given kind of social group with (...) four complementary profiles: its “construction” profile, its “extra essentials” profile, its “anchor” profile, and its “accident” profile. Together these provide a framework for understanding the nature of groups, help classify and categorize groups, and shed light on group agency. (shrink)

Big Data has the potential to enable unprecedentedly rigorous quantitative modeling of complex human social relationships and social structures. When such models are extended to nonhuman domains, they can undermine anthropocentric assumptions about the extent to which these relationships and structures are specifically human. Discoveries of relevant commonalities with nonhumans may not make us less human, but they promise to challenge fundamental views of what it is to be human.

In the social constructionist literature, little has been said about what it means for social factors to cause X in such a way that X would count as causally socially constructed. In this paper, I argue that being caused by social factors – and thus being causally socially constructed – is best defined in terms of a contrastive counterfactual notion of causation. Unlike some plausible alternatives, this definition captures what is at stake in actual social constructionist debates. It makes transparent (...) which factors the truth of a causal constructionist claim may depend on. By doing so, it sheds light on what the disagreements over whether X is causally socially constructed may turn on. It also helps us to see under which condition the claim that X is socially causally constructed is compatible with the claim that X is caused by biological factors. (shrink)

This article discusses the concept of evidential reasoning in the context of qualitative research methods in the social sciences. A conceptualization of qualitative evidential reasoning is proposed...

Two great problems of learning confront humanity: learning about the nature of the universe and about ourselves and other living things as a part of the universe, and learning how to become civilized or enlightened. The first problem was solved, in essence, in the 17th century, with the creation of modern science. But the second problem has not yet been solved. Solving the first problem without also solving the second puts us in a situation of great danger. All our current (...) global problems have arisen as a result. What we need to do, in response to this unprecedented crisis, is learn from our solution to the first problem how to solve the second one. This was the basic idea of the 18th century Enlightenment. Unfortunately, in carrying out this programme, the Enlightenment made three blunders, and it is this defective version of the Enlightenment programme, inherited from the past, that is still built into the institutional/intellectual structure of academic inquiry in the 21st century. In order to solve the second great problem of learning we need to correct the three blunders of the traditional Enlightenment. This involves changing the nature of social inquiry, so that social science becomes social methodology or social philosophy, concerned to help us build into social life the progress-achieving methods of aim-oriented rationality, arrived at by generalizing the progress-achieving methods of science. It also involves, more generally, bringing about a revolution in the nature of academic inquiry as a whole, so that it takes up its proper task of helping humanity learn how to become wiser by increasingly cooperatively rational means. The scientific task of improving knowledge and understanding of nature becomes a part of the broader task of improving global wisdom. The outcome would be what we so urgently need: a kind of inquiry rationally designed and devoted to helping us make progress towards a genuinely civilized world. We would succeed in doing what the Enlightenment tried but failed to do: learn from scientific progress how to go about making social progress towards as good a world as possible. (shrink)

Shame is one of the most stigmatized and stigmatizing of emotions. Often characterized as an emotion in which the subject holds a global, negative self-assessment, shame is typically understood to mark the subject as being inadequate in some way, and a sizable amount of work on shame focuses on its problematic or unhealthy aspects, effects, or consequences. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Shame brings into view a more balanced understanding of what shame is and its value and social function. The contributors recognize (...) shame as a complex, richly layered, conscious or unconscious phenomenon, and the collection offers an understanding of what shame is, the scholarly discourse on shame, and how theories of shame help us to understand ourselves, others, and the world around us. It also highlights a diverse range of perspectives on shame, and how these unique perspectives can enlighten our understanding of both the positive and negative aspects of this powerful emotion. Edited by Cecilea Mun, the ten chapters by an international group of contributors reflect a broad range of methods, disciplinary perspectives, and both theoretical and practical concerns regarding shame. -/- 30% Discount Code: LEX30AUTH1. (shrink)

Fuller carries social constructionism to its bitter end in his theory of the “post-truth condition”—endemic to current life and to the entirety of Western Philosophy. According to Fuller, the gates to the elitist power/knowledge-games have been crashed by the democratic mob. Fuller implicitly extends Popper’s radicalism in the philosophy of science to political and social philosophy. Rather than Popper’s piecemeal social engineering for the purpose of minimizing human suffering, Fuller promotes revolutionary social change in the face of catastrophes. Fuller pushes (...) for a “proactionary” approach because the current vast social change refutes the fragility-assumption of Popper’s “risk-adverse” sociopolitical philosophy. (shrink)

Публикация (#4) из научно-популярного цикла: "Структурная онтология познания с доктором Шимко".