Philosophy of Sociology, Misc

Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory relies on concepts of four kinds of capital: economic, social, cultural, and symbolic. The anthropologist Pnina Werbner raises the issue of whether the concept of symbolic capital faces a paradox, because within some social groups one can only gain such capital by denying its value. There is a question of how best to clarify the paradox and I offer a clarification.

I propose a novel model of the human ego (which I define as the tendency to measure one’s value based on extrinsic success rather than intrinsic aptitude or ability). I further propose the conjecture that ego so defined both is a non-adaptive by-product of evolutionary pressures, and has some evolutionary value as an adaptation (protecting self-interest). I explore ramifications of this model, including how it mediates individuals’ reactions to perceived and actual limits of their power, their ability to cope with (...) risk and uncertainty, and how this model may interpolate between rational choice models and cognitive psychology. I develop numerous examples and applications, including poverty traps, to demonstrate the model’s predictive power to elucidate a broad range of social phenomena. -/- [December 2018: Updated version to submit for publication. Expanded Sections 4 and 5.1, revised Section 5.7] -/- . (shrink)

Analytical sociology has provided the social sciences with a fresh, new perspective. But there are still many lacunae left to fill within sociological thought. In this paper I will address one of these gaps; I believe that sociology is missing a framework with which to adequately address the intersubjective, intentional nature of micro-social dynamics. I will introduce a rough outline of a formal system of intentionality—as it pertains to the micro-social—that observes the overall methodology and principles of analytical sociology. Moreover, (...) I will couple this system with one consisting of intersubjective belief dynamic. It is hoped that this theoretical design will contribute towards an eventual “bridging of the gap” between the macro and the micro, and that it will provide greater insight into the nature of the micro-social. (shrink)

Nowadays, hardly anything works as it should in Germany. Whether energy supply, digitization, health, pension or infrastructure. More and more often, serious consequences of wrong strategic decisions and an increasingly ideologically shaped dilettantism are becoming visible: Purchasing power and prosperity are dwindling, taxes and fees are increasing, regulative proliferation and bureaucracy are hostile to innovation and a todays shrinking middle class must always harder fight to prevent its own decline as well as not to leave worse conditions to the next (...) generation. If this does not change fundamentally, upcoming decades will face in real time how a nation destroys itself and gambles away the future of its children. Freedom, democracy and the rule of law: If we want to preserve them, we have to rely on competence and quality and not on ideology and mediocrity. Otherwise, one day authoritarian systems will take us over! -/- Kaum etwas funktioniert in Deutschland noch wie es sollte. Ob Energieversorgung, Digitalisierung, Gesundheit, Rente oder Infrastruktur. Immer öfter werden gravierende Folgen strategischer Fehlentscheidungen und eines zunehmend ideologisch geprägten Dilettantismus' sichtbar: Kaufkraft und Wohlstand schwinden, Abgaben und Gebühren steigen, der Regelungswildwuchs und die Bürokratie sind innovationsfeindlich und eine schrumpfende Mittelschicht kämpft heute darum, den eigenen Abstieg zu verhindern und der nächsten Generation keine schlechteren Rahmenbedingungen zu hinterlassen. Wenn sich daran nichts grundlegend ändert lässt sich kommende Jahrzehnte in Echtzeit beobachten, wie eine Nation sich selbst zerstört und die Zukunft ihrer Kinder verspielt. Freiheit, Demokratie und Rechtsstaat: Wollen wir sie erhalten, müssen wir auf Kompetenz und Qualität und nicht auf Gesinnung und Mittelmaß setzen. Denn sonst überrollen uns irgendwann autoritäre Systeme! -/- . (shrink)

Our aim in this chapter is to contribute to a greater appreciation of Bourdieu’s work within debates on embodied, extended and distributed cognition, grouped under the general heading of externalism (Rowlands 2003, Carter et al. 2014). We seek to draw out several pertinent elements of Bourdieu’s theory of social practice, and show how they variously resonate with, enrich, or problematize key externalist theses. We begin with an overview of the main elements of Bourdieu’s theoretical enterprise, in order to provide essential (...) background for the ensuing discussion. We then address a number of themes connecting Bourdieu’s theory with facets of cognitive externalism, which we organize under the headings of diachronic co-dependence, instrumental dependence, and co-constitutive dependence. Following this we turn our attention to epistemic externalism, where we find promising ground for dialogue with Bourdieu in recent developments in virtue epistemology, focusing our analysis on a recent proposal concerning knowledge-how by Carter & Pritchard (2015). We conclude with an assessment of Bourdieu’s standing with respect to these currents, and prospects for further engagement. (shrink)

Au contraire des sciences physiques, la sociologie est souvent décrite comme une science interprétative et non-expérimentale. L’épistémologie apporte un éclairage nouveau sur cette position : 1) L’expérimentation n’est pas un trait constant des sciences physiques ; 2) Le raisonnement expérimental est également applicable en sociologie. L’argument est développé en comparant en détail le test de la prédiction d’une déviation des rayons lumineux dans un champ de gravitation effectué en 1919 et le test de la prédiction d’un taux de cosmopolitisme de (...) 8 % de l’université de Cambridge dans la période 1250-1350. Le dépouillement des notices prosopographiques des maîtres régents donne un résultat de 9,5 % proche de la prédiction théorique initiale. (shrink)

Social scientists appeal to various “structures” in their explanations including public policies, economic systems, and social hierarchies. Significant debate surrounds the explanatory relevance of these factors for various outcomes such as health, behavioral, and economic patterns. This paper provides a causal account of social structural explanation that is motivated by Haslanger (2016). This account suggests that social structure can be explanatory in virtue of operating as a causal constraint, which is a causal factor with unique characteristics. A novel causal framework (...) is provided for understanding these explanations–this framework addresses puzzles regarding the mysterious causal influence of social structure, how to understand its relation to individual choice, and what makes it the main explanatory (and causally responsible) factor for various outcomes. (shrink)

Exploration of the process/es and features of theorizing. Investigation of the so-called methods, techniques and tools of doing philosophy or philosophizing and illustrating that they resemble the methods of the process/es of theorizing. Showing that the some or most of the same process are implicit and underlying social theory and the development of such theory with Habermas as example.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists 1571 as the year of the first recorded use of the English word ‘masculinity’; the Ancient Greek ανδρεια (andreia), usually translated as ‘courage’, was also used to refer to manliness. The notion of manliness or masculinity is undoubtedly older still. Yet, despite this seeming familiarity, not only is the notion proving to be highly elusive, its understanding by the society being in a constant flux, but also one which is at the root of bitter (...) division and confrontation, and which has tangible and far-reaching real-world effects. At the same time, while masculinity has been attracting an increasing amount of attention in academia, the large body of published work seldom goes to the very foundations of the issue, failing to explicitly and with clarity reach a consensus as to how masculinity ought to be understood. Herein I critique the leading contemporary thought, showing it to be poorly conceived and confounded, and often lacking in substance which would raise it to the level of the actionable and constructive. Hence, I propose an alternative view which is void of the observed deficiencies, and discuss how its adoption would facilitate a conciliation between the currently warring factions, focusing everybody’s efforts on addressing the actual ethical, deconfounded of specious distractions. (shrink)

How does material culture matter for institutions? Material objects are increasingly prominent in sociological research, but current studies offer limited insight for how material objects matter to institutional processes. We build on sociological insights to theorize aesthetic style, a shared pattern of material object presence and usage among a cluster of organizations in an institutional field. We use formal relational methods and a survey of material objects from religious congregations to uncover the aesthetic styles that are part of the “logics (...) of god” in the United States’ Christian religious field. We argue aesthetic styles help structure an institutional field by spanning objects’ meanings across space and time, stabilizing objects’ authority, and demarcating symbolic boundaries. Our research provides a conceptual tool for understanding how objects bridge the material and symbolic dimensions of institutions and a methodological example for examining the meaning of objects across numerous organizations in an institutional field. (shrink)

Latour does not seek any “hidden” reasons behind actions; there is not a dictionary or encyclopedia explaining the sources of the behaviors of the actors. No meta-language is in question. The analyst cannot address any invisible agency. If an agency is invisible, then it has no effect, therefore it is not an agency. If an analyst says: “No one mentions it. For Latour, agency is not limited to human beings, but objects should also be counted as agents which is one (...) of the most attractive aspect of actor-network theory. (shrink)

Discussions in sociological theory often focus on ontological questions on the nature of social reality. Against the underlying epistemological realism, I argue for a constructivist notion of theory: Theories are webs of concepts that we use to guide empirical observations and to make sense of them. We cannot know the real features of the social world, only what our theoretical perspectives make us see. Theories therefore represent social phenomena by highlighting certain features and relating them in a logical system. In (...) this system, theoretical sentences can be considered true if they meet two conditions: They are consistent with the theory at hand and adequately map empirically observable relations between objects denoted by theoretical constructs. Truth is therefore relative to a perspective; it is not objectively determinable. Theories should be assessed not for their ontologies but for what they allow us to see and how they connect to empirical observations. (shrink)

The metaphor of “repertoire” is increasingly used in the study of contention to convey the fact that people act collectively through a limited set of cultural routines. Yet despite its broad adoption, the term is loosely defined and rarely subject to empirical verification. This has led to unfruitful scholarly disputes, with most perspectives assuming that change in repertoires is independent from how actors perform them. Drawing a parallel between the dynamics of repertoire performance and jazz improvisation, I propose a pragmatist (...) definition of repertoires, understood as relational sets of collective practices that become routinized as habit-sets and become a baseline for innovation when actors face puzzling situations. I then provide a theoretical model for analyzing change in contentious repertoires, which relies on the study of the co-constitutive relation between tactical affordances, actors’ strategies and identities, and contexts. I illustrate this model with three secondary cases of unexpected tactical innovation. (shrink)

Contention in the form of protests, riots, and direct action is a central political practice in contemporary democracies. It is also a staple of sociological analysis, after slowly crystallizing as a distinct object of analysis from the 1970s onward. Lately, however, it has become unclear what this distinctiveness consists of and how it may help guide studies of contention: What distinguishes contention from other practices? I argue that contention can be seen as an ontologically distinctive experience. What sets this experience (...) apart is that it expresses a potential for conflict that underlies all social formations. We can take these expressions of conflict as objects of analysis. This means asking how the conflict expressed in contentious practices is ascribed meaning. I develop this perspective theoretically and show how it may facilitate new empirical analyses of contention’s boundaries, its relation to truth, and ethical relations in contention. (shrink)

The study of social inequality and stratification has long been at the core of sociology and the social sciences. In this article, I argue that certain tendencies have become entrenched in our dominant paradigm that leave many researchers pursuing coarse-grained analyses of how difference relates to inequality. Centrally, despite the importance of categories and categorization for how researchers study social inequality, contemporary theories of categories are poorly integrated into conventional research. I contend that the widespread and often unquestioned use of (...) state categories as categories of analysis reinforces these tendencies. Using research on colorism as an inspiration, I highlight several components of what I call the infracategorical model of inequality, which urges researchers to disaggregate difference by shifting our focus from membership in categories to the cues of categories, membership in subcategories, and perceived typicality. (shrink)

In Nietzsche and Sociology: Prophet of Affirmation, Anas Karzai attempts to revive and defend the thesis that there is a crucial yet neglected connection between Nietzsche and sociology. In particular, Karzai’s book discusses the relevance of Nietzsche’s critical reflections on society and culture to modern sociological theory, which descends from Kant and Comte through Marx and Engels to Durkheim and Weber. The book has a critical agenda as well. By making use of Nietzsche’s insights into society, culture, and politics, Karzai (...) hopes to expose how modern sociological theory retains many of the assumptions and approaches that gained a foothold during the reign of orthodox positivism of the 19th century, which reflect traditional sociology’s stubborn preoccupation with the issues of social order and moral integration. -/- . (shrink)

This article explores histories of the science of stress and its measurement from the mid 19th century, and brings these into dialogue with critical sociological analysis of emerging responses to work stress in policy and practice. In particular, it shows how the contemporary development of biomedical and consumer devices for stress self-monitoring is based on selectively rediscovering the biological determinants and biomarkers of stress, human functioning in terms of evolutionary ecology, and the physical health impacts of stress. It considers how (...) the placement of the individual body and its environment within particular spatio-temporal configurations renders it subject to experimental investigation through standardized apparatus, electricity, and statistical normalization. Examining key themes and processes such as homeostasis, metricization, datafication, and emotional governance, we conclude that the figure of the ‘body electric’ plays a central limiting role in current technology-supported approaches to managing work stress, and that an historical account can usefully open these to collective scrutiny. (shrink)

Bourdieu’s concept of habitus claims to solve the problem of the individual/society duality. However, the concept of habitus appears to be inadequate to explain the idiosyncratic features of individual field actors’ practices. In this article, I argue that to explain the particularity of individual habitus, we must appreciate the operationalization of relational logic in field theory. I further argue that individuals learn to prediscursively identify certain types of practices as meaningful for a given field position because of their embodied experiences (...) of movements within the historically specific relational structure of the field. Thus, the same individual can exhibit multiple and even contradictory practices depending on the person’s relational position in the field. I illustrate this insight by discussing the political habitus of the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. (shrink)

The image of Max Weber as an “interpretivist” cultural theorist of webs of significance that people use to cope with a meaningless world reigns largely unquestioned today. This article presents a different image of Weber’s sociology, where meaning does not transport actors over an abyss of meaninglessness but rather helps them navigate a world of Chance. Retrieving this concept from Weber’s late writings, we argue that the fundamental basis of the orders sociologists seek to understand is not chaos. Action is (...) rendered interpretable, rather, to the extent persons orient themselves to possibilities and probabilities, which remain real but unknowable. In this framework, interpretation and probability are allies, not antagonists. Weber’s systematic use of the probabilistic notion of Chance as a central resource for concept formation and sociological explanation seriously challenges current understandings of probability as a purely statistical, atheoretical concern. We outline the conceptual difference it makes when basic categories of sociology are understood as rooted in Chance, and we point to the larger implications of Weber’s probabilism for contemporary debates around issues of prediction, action, and interpretation. (shrink)

We rarely acknowledge the achievements of doctoral candidates who fought with all they had but still lost the battle and dropped out – we know so little about what becomes of them. This reflective article is about the betrayals of PhD supervisors in one institution, the trauma and stigma of withdrawing from that institution, writing poetry as a coping mechanism and the triumph in completing a Thesis by Publication (TBP) in another institution. Thus, I build on Lesley Saunders’s idea about (...) using poetry to operate on ‘a personal capacity’ in educational research. Accordingly, I present an original autoethnographic poem and other poetic artefacts as well as reflections to sharpen the sociological eye of my story. In it, I merge two different segments of experiences in poetry – trauma and triumph – to draw an image of my doctoral journey, in the moment and in retrospection. By doing so, I illuminate the struggles involved in becoming an independent researcher. I also encourage practitioners to conceive that their negative experiences in doing educational research can be transformed into an achievement depending on the stand they take when faced with it. Certainly, poor academic performance can be closely associated with abandoning doctoral studies, but that is not always the case. Therefore, it is my hope that this autoethnographic work may instill hope in doctoral candidates who are still in the struggle to find a voice. (shrink)

Ce livre est un livre d’épistémologie de la sociologie. L’objectif est d’appliquer des méthodes analytiques pour clarifier le vocabulaire, expliciter des relations non-apparentes entre concepts, dégager la portée d’une méthode, ou souligner les incohérences d’un programme de recherche. Les questions épineuses ne sont pas écartéees: Comment clarifier des notions confuses? Peut-on mathématiser les concepts sociologiques? Peut-on pratiquer la sociologie comme on pratique les sciences naturelles? Quelle est la place du déterminisme? Chaque question est examinée à la fois dans sa structure (...) logique et sur des cas concrets. La mathématisation est étudiée sur les mécanismes agrégatifs et sur les modèles de diffusion des innovations. La sociologie expérimentale – généralement méconnue dans la sociologie française – est étudiée sur des programmes de relogement, la diffusion de l’information, ou la genèse de la solidarité sociale. Le livre aborde frontalement la question du déterminisme, du naturalisme, du matérialisme et du scientisme, réputés intenables en sociologie. L’enquête montre que leur rejet résulte généralement de confusions conceptuelles. Une fois écartées, peu d’obstacles s’opposent à leur emploi en sociologie. L’objet de ce livre est la sociologie fondamentale: ensemble des mécanismes qui structurent la production des connaissances sociologiques de base à partir de concepts, programmes ou principes, c’est-à-dire tout ce qui ne relève pas de l’expérience immédiate du terrain et des mondes sociaux. (shrink)

Under which conditions are social relationships hierarchical, and under which conditions are they not? This article has three main aims. First, I will explain what this question amounts to by providing a more detailed description of the general phenomenon of social hierarchy. Second, I will provide an account of what social hierarchy is. Third, I will provide some considerations in favour of this account by discussing how it improves upon three alternative ways of thinking about social hierarchy that are sometimes (...) explicitly endorsed and sometimes suggested or presupposed in writings in philosophy and elsewhere. (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)

This article is about the future of sociology, as transformations in the digital and biological sciences lay claim to the discipline’s jurisdictional hold over ‘the social’. Rather than analyse the specifics of these transformations, however, the focus of the article is on how a narrative of methodological crisis is sustained in sociology, and on how such a narrative conjures very particular disciplinary futures. Through a close reading of key texts, the article makes two claims: (1) that a surprisingly conventional urge (...) towards disciplinary reproduction often animates accounts of sociology’s crisis; (2) that, even more surprisingly, these same accounts are often haunted by a hidden metaphorical architecture centred on biology, vitality, vigour and life. The central gambit of the article is that, perhaps in spite of itself, this subterranean image of life actually hints at less reproductively conventional ways of understanding – and intervening in – sociology’s methodological ‘crisis’. Drawing, empirically, on the author’s recent work on urban stress and, theoretically, on Stefan Helmreich’s (2011, 2016) account of ‘limit biologies’, the articles ends with a call for a ‘limit sociology’ – a form of attention that could, similarly, expand rather than contract the present moment of transformation. At the heart of the article is a hope that thinking with such a limit may help sociologists to imagine a less deadening future than that on offer from a canonised discipline cathected by endless crisis-talk. (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.

Methodological divisions in sociology, the study of the social, are not just deep and persistent but patterned—most obviously in the separate development of qualitative methods in ethnography and grounded theory, but also in subsidiary divisions within those separations, following the same pattern. The pattern being too deep-rooted to be explained as empirical happenstance, it will be explored here as the effect of an equally deep-rooted condition. More exactly, through postulating that sociology’s subject-matter, the social, is ontologically rooted in an essential (...) ambiguity between abstraction and individuation. Four criteria are drawn from the idea of the dichotomy being constitutively essential, which this or any alternative candidates must meet. The article conducts the postulate through the criteria, and applies the criterion of separating better from worse sociological theory to the work of Pierre Bourdieu. (shrink)

There is a plurality of theoretical approaches, methodological tools, and explanatory strategies in the social sciences. Different fields rely on different methods and explanatory tools even when they study the very same phenomena. We illustrate this plurality of the social sciences with the studies of crowds. We show how three different takes on crowd phenomena—psychology, rational choice theory, and network theory—can complement one another. We conclude that social scientists are better described as researchers endowed with explanatory toolkits than specialists of (...) some specific social domain. Social scientists’ toolkits are adapted for identifying and specifying the role of specific causal factors among the multiple factors that produce social phenomena. These factors can be, in a nonexclusive way, economic incentives, psychological processes, the ecology, or aspects of the social and cultural environment. The plurality of methods and theories in the social sciences flies in the face of the project to unify the sciences associated with the positivists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet, the compatibility and consilience of theories and practices still have epistemic value: they enable the development of more powerful and robust theories and they allow the advent of interdisciplinary studies. We present the integrative stance as the will to improve compatibility and consilience across fields, yet recognize that the plurality of causes of social phenomena invite a diversity of methodological and theoretical tools. We conclude by characterizing naturalism as an integrative stance applied to fields that belong to the social science and to the natural sciences. (shrink)

How are middle-range theories about causal mechanisms built from case studies in the social sciences? My aim is to answer this question by analyzing and improving Derek Beach and Rasmus Brun Pedersen’s account of the method of theory-building process-tracing. After having introduced the basic issues and concepts, I move on to analyze their descriptions of theory-building process-tracing. I identify some ambiguities and problems in their notions of middle-range theory and causal mechanism. In the constructive part of the paper, I provide (...) accounts of causal mechanisms and middle-range theories that aim to resolve the problems and ambiguities in Beach and Pedersen’s views. I close the paper by showing how the method of theory-building process-tracing can be improved by utilizing these views. (shrink)

Unlike the physical sciences, sociology is frequently described as an interpretative non-experimental science. Comparative epistemology sheds new light on this claim. 1. Experimentation is not a constant character of the physical sciences; 2. Experimental hypothetical-deductive reasoning, including the test of predictions, is also practicable in sociology. The argument is developed by a detailed step-wise comparison of the prediction of light ray deviation within the Sun’s gravitational field made in 1919 (physics) and the prediction of 8% cosmopolitanism of Cambridge University between (...) 1250 and 1350 (sociology). Extensive analysis of regent masters’ prosopographic notes yields the result of 9.5 percent cosmopolitanism, which is close to the theoretical prediction. (shrink)

Is the appropriate form of human action explanation causal or rather teleological? While this is a central question in analytic philosophy of action, it also has implications for the question whether there are differences in principle between the methods of explanation in the sciences on the one hand and in the humanities and the social sciences on the other. The question bears on the problem of the appropriate form of explanations of past human actions, and therefore it is prominently discussed (...) by analytic philosophers of historiography. This volume comprises contributions from causalists and anti-causalists who address enduring philosophical problems of this debate, as well as their implications for the practice of historiography. Part I considers the quarrel between causalism and anti-causalism in recent developments in the philosophy of action. Part II presents chapters by causalists and anti-causalists that are more narrowly focused on the philosophy of historiography. (shrink)

Affect and emotion have come to dominate discourse on social and political life in the mobile and networked societies of the early 21st century. This volume introduces a unique collection of essential concepts for theorizing and empirically investigating societies as Affective Societies. The concepts engender insights into the affective foundations of social coexistence and are indispensable to comprehend the many areas of conflict linked to emotion such as migration, political populism, or local and global inequalities. Each chapters provides historical orientation; (...) detailed explication of the concept in question, clear-cut research examples, and an outlook toward future research. (shrink)

When philosophers discuss the possibility of machines making scientific discoveries, they typically focus on discoveries in physics, biology, chemistry and mathematics. Observing the rapid increase of computer-use in science, however, it becomes natural to ask whether there are any scientific domains out of reach for machine discovery. For example, could machines also make discoveries in qualitative social science? Is there something about humans that makes us uniquely suited to studying humans? Is there something about machines that would bar them from (...) such activity? A close look at the methodology of interpretive social science reveals several abilities necessary to make a social scientific discovery, and one capacity necessary to possess any of them is imagination. For machines to make discoveries in social science, therefore, they must possess imagination algorithms. (shrink)

Social types, or types of persons, occupy a curious place in the history of sociology. There has never been any agreement on how they should be used, or what their import is. Yet the problems surrounding their use are instructive, symptomatic of key ambivalences at the heart of the sociological enterprise. These include a tension between theories of social order that privilege the division of labour and those that focus on large-scale cultural complexes; a tension between the analysis of society (...) in terms of social groups and an acknowledgement of modern individualism; sociology’s location somewhere between literature and science; and sociology’s awkward response to the claim – made by both Catholic conservatives and Marxists – that modern industrial and post-industrial society cannot be a society of estates. These ambivalences may help to explain why the attempts to use social types for the purpose of cultural diagnosis – from the interesting portrait of arbitrarily selected positions in the division of labour to more ambitious guesswork about modern culture’s dominant ‘characters’ – have been unconvincing. (shrink)

Generalization from a case study is a perennial issue in the methodology of the social sciences. The case study is one of the most important research designs in many social scientific fields, but no shared understanding exists of the epistemic import of case studies. This article suggests that the idea of mechanism-based theorizing provides a fruitful basis for understanding how case studies contribute to a general understanding of social phenomena. This approach is illustrated with a re- construction of Espeland and (...) Sauder's case study of the effects of rankings on US legal education. On the basis of the reconstruction, it is argued that, at least with respect to sociology, the idea of mechanism-based theorizing captures many of the generalizable elements of case studies. (shrink)

I make a contribution to the sociology of epistemologies by examining the neuroscience literature on love from 2000 to 2016. I find that researchers make consequential assumptions concerning the production or generation of love, its temporality, its individual character, and appropriate control conditions. Next, I consider how to account for these assumptions’ being common in the literature. More generally, I’m interested in the ways in which epistemic communities construe, conceive of, and publicly represent and work with their objects of inquiry—and (...) what’s thereby assumed about them and about the world. I argue that these implicit or explicit assumptions are a distinct type of explanandum, whose distinctiveness sociology hasn’t adequately appreciated and taken advantage of. I think it should and I hope it will. (shrink)

Philosophers of science debate the proper role of non-epistemic value judgements in scientific reasoning. Many modern authors oppose the value free ideal, claiming that we should not even try to get scientists to eliminate all such non-epistemic value judgements from their reasoning. W. E. B. Du Bois, on the other hand, has a defence of the value free ideal in science that is rooted in a conception of the proper place of science in a democracy. In particular, Du Bois argues (...) that the value free ideal must be upheld in order to, first, retain public trust in science and, second, ensure that those best placed to make use of scientifically acquired information are able to do so. This latter argument turns out to relate Du Bois’ position on the value free ideal in science to his defence of epistemic democracy. In this essay I elaborate, motivate, and relate to the modern debate, Du Bois’ under-appreciated defence of the value free ideal. (shrink)

In this article we propose a framework for description and analysis of public life by treating “outings” as a unit of sociological analysis. Studying outings requires bracketing a concern with bounded places and isolated encounters. Instead, descriptions of outings track people as they organize trips “out,” including their preparations, turning points, and post hoc reflections. We emphasize how people understand and contextualize their time in public by linking situated moments of public life to the outing’s unfolding trajectory and to people’s (...) biographical circumstances. We treat outings in and through public parks as a strategic site to show the utility of studying public outings more generally. A sociology of outings has broad theoretical and methodological implications for how we understand the collective patterning of public life and inequality in everyday encounters. (shrink)

Sociologists are increasingly attentive to the mechanisms responsible for cause-and-effect relationships in the social world. But an aspect of mechanistic causality has not been sufficiently considered. It is well recognized that most phenomena of interest to social science result from multiple mechanisms operating in sequence. However, causal chains—sequentially linked mechanisms and their enabling background conditions—vary not just substantively, by the kind of causal work they do, but also structurally, by their formal properties. In this article, the author examines the nature (...) of causal chains, identifies major structural dimensions along which they differ, and makes a case that a mechanism-based explanation would be enhanced if causal chains and their structures were brought to the analytical forefront. (shrink)

In his own words, Herbert Gintis’s latest book is “an analysis of human nature and a tribute to its wonders” (3).1More prosaically, it is a collection of essays, some of which are original and others published elsewhere. Instead of being structured around topics in decision and game theory,like his previous book (2009), this book develops interrelated themes, such as the evolutionary origins of moral sense, its central role in political games, and the socially entangled nature of human rationality and individuality. (...) Some chapters develop Gintis’svision of the unified behavioral sciences by model-building demonstrations; others do so by reflecting on history and methodology. (shrink)

This article argues that empirical social scientists can be freed from having to account for “micro-to-macro transitions.” The article shows, in opposition to the (still) dominant perspective based on Coleman’s macro-micro-macro model, that no micro-macro transitions or mechanisms connect the individual level to the macro level in empirical social science. Rather, when considering that social macro entities and properties are micro manifest rather than macro manifest, it becomes clear that the micro-macro move in empirical social science is purely conceptual or (...) analytical. (shrink)

We argue that claims of racial progress rest upon untenable teleological assumptions founded in Enlightenment discourse. We examine the theoretical and methodological focus on progress and its historical roots. We argue research should examine the concrete mechanisms that produce racial stability and change, and we offer three alternative frameworks for interpreting longitudinal racial data and phenomena. The first sees racism as a “fundamental cause,” arguing that race remains a “master category” of social differentiation. The second builds on Glenn’s “settler colonialism (...) as structure” framework to describe race relations as a mutually constituted and place-based system of resource allocation. The third framework draws attention to racialized agency. (shrink)

Esse texto procura explicitar a tese da compreensão atual que Simmel pressupõe como lócus de apreensão e interpretação dos processos humanos dotados de sentido. Para explicitá-la, confronta as posições de Dilthey e Simmel sobre o papel da vivência na fundamentação do conhecimento histórico. Ao contrário de Dilthey, no entanto, Simmel não pressupõe uma vivência que possa ser apreendida em outrem ou circunscrita a partir de um objeto, porque põe o fundamento da compreensão na atualidade daquele que compreende. Assim, opera com (...) possibilidades objetivas da construção de conexões de sentido por meio da projeção de processos psíquicos. Conquanto dificilmente seja lembrado no debate sobre a compreensão ou sobre a filosofia da história, Simmel possui uma posição própria e consistente acerca da fundamentação do conhecimento histórico, que pode ou abrir novos ângulos de pesquisa ou ser fecunda para se reexaminar perspectivas já consolidadas. (shrink)