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  1. The Social and the Individual: Reduction without Identity.Peter Baumann - 2024 - Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 80 (3):1027-1048.
    This paper explores the relationship between social and individual phenomena, advocating for a form of analytical individualism that incorporates both ontological and explanatory holism. The first part of the paper addresses foundational ontological questions, arguing for the reduction of social facts to individual behaviors without equating them in identity. In the second part, the discussion focuses on collective intentionality, particularly through a critical examination of John Searle’s account. I argue that while collective intentionality offers useful insights into the nature of (...)
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  2. (1 other version)The Causal Exclusion Argument and its Critique in Debates on Reductionism: The Case of One Specific Clash.Oleksandr Holubenko - 2024 - Философия И Космология 32:127-140.
    One of the modern forms of philosophical discussion about the essence of mentality is the dispute between (“classical”) physicalists (who take a reductionist position) and the so-called non-reductive materialists. Non-reductive materialists are property dualists who claim supervenient relations between physical and mental properties. Such a non-reductive scheme claims that mental properties occupy a specific ontological level and, as a result, have their own causal power. Perhaps the most effective physicalist counterargument against such a position is the Causal Exclusion Argument, which (...)
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  3. Criticism of individualist and collectivist methodological approaches to social emergence.S. M. Reza Amiri Tehrani - 2023 - Expositions: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities 15 (3):111-139.
    ABSTRACT The individual-community relationship has always been one of the most fundamental topics of social sciences. In sociology, this is known as the micro-macro relationship while in economics it refers to the processes, through which, individual actions lead to macroeconomic phenomena. Based on philosophical discourse and systems theory, many sociologists even use the term "emergence" in their understanding of micro-macro relationship, which refers to collective phenomena that are created by the cooperation of individuals, but cannot be reduced to individual actions. (...)
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  4. Functional Reduction with a Third Step:a Larger and Less Reductive Picture.Ronald Endicott - 2022 - ProtoSociology 39:89-106.
    Functional reduction follows two familiar steps: a definition of a higher-level or special science property in terms of a functional role, then a statement describing a physical property that plays or occupies that role. But Kim (2005) adds a third step, namely, an explanation regarding how the physical property occupies the functional role. I think Kim is correct. But how is the third step satisfied? An examination of the pertinent scientific explanations reveals that the third step is best satisfied by (...)
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  5. An impossibility result on methodological individualism.Hein Duijf, Allard Tamminga & Frederik Van De Putte - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (12):4165-4185.
    Methodological individualists often claim that any social phenomenon can ultimately be explained in terms of the actions and interactions of individuals. Any Nagelian version of methodological individualism requires that there be bridge laws that translate social statements into individualistic ones. We show that Nagelian individualism can be put to logical scrutiny by making the relevant social and individualistic languages fully explicit and mathematically precise. In particular, we prove that the social statement that a group of (at least two) agents performs (...)
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  6. Mapping higher-level causal efficacy.Horia Tarnovanu - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):8533-8554.
    A central argument for non-reductive accounts of group agency is that complex social entities are capable of exerting causal influence independently of and superseding the causal efficacy of the individuals constituting them. A prominent counter is that non-reductionists run into an insuperable dilemma between identity and redundancy – with identity undermining independent higher-level efficacy and redundancy leading to overdetermination or exclusion. This paper argues that critics of non-reductionism can manage with a simpler and more persuasive reductio strategy called mapping: allow (...)
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  7. Econophysics: making sense of a chimera.Adrian K. Yee - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (4):1-34.
    The history of economic thought witnessed several prominent economists who took seriously models and concepts in physics for the elucidation and prediction of economic phenomena. Econophysics is an emerging discipline at the intersection of heterodox economics and the physics of complex systems, with practitioners typically engaged in two overlapping but distinct methodological programs. The first is to export mathematical methods used in physics for the purposes of studying economic phenomena. The second is to export mechanisms in physics into economics. A (...)
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  8. Causal powers and social ontology.Tobias Hansson Wahlberg - 2020 - Synthese 197 (3):1357-1377.
    Over the last few decades, philosophers and social scientists have applied the so-called powers ontology to the social domain. I argue that this application is highly problematic: many of the alleged powers in the social realm violate the intrinsicality condition, and those that can be coherently taken to be intrinsic to their bearers are arguably causally redundant. I end the paper by offering a diagnosis of why philosophers and social scientists have been tempted to think that there are powers in (...)
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  9. Failures of Methodological Individualism: The Materiality of Social Systems.Sally Haslanger - 2020 - Journal of Social Philosophy 53 (4):512-534.
  10. Groups as pluralities.John Horden & Dan López de Sa - 2020 - Synthese 198 (11):10237-10271.
    We say that each social group is identical to its members. The group just is them; they just are the group. This view of groups as pluralities has tended to be swiftly rejected by social metaphysicians, if considered at all, mainly on the basis of two objections. First, it is argued that groups can change in membership, while pluralities cannot. Second, it is argued that different groups can have exactly the same members, while different pluralities cannot. We rebut these objections, (...)
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  11. Why the social sciences are irreducible.Tobias Hansson Wahlberg - 2019 - Synthese 196 (12):4961-4987.
    It is often claimed that the social sciences cannot be reduced to a lower-level individualistic science. The standard argument for this position is the Fodorian multiple realizability argument. Its defenders endorse token–token identities between “higher-level” social objects and pluralities/sums of “lower-level” individuals, but they maintain that the properties expressed by social science predicates are often multiply realizable, entailing that type–type identities between social and individualistic properties are ruled out. In this paper I argue that the multiple realizability argument for explanatory (...)
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  12. Social Ontology.Brian Epstein - 2018 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Social ontology is the study of the nature and properties of the social world. It is concerned with analyzing the various entities in the world that arise from social interaction. -/- A prominent topic in social ontology is the analysis of social groups. Do social groups exist at all? If so, what sorts of entities are they, and how are they created? Is a social group distinct from the collection of people who are its members, and if so, how is (...)
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  13. Reduction Without Elimination: Mental Disorders as Causally Efficacious Properties.Gottfried Vosgerau & Patrice Soom - 2018 - Minds and Machines 28 (2):311-330.
    We argue that any account of mental disorders that meets the desideratum of assigning causal efficacy to mental disorders faces the so-called “causal exclusion problem”. We argue that fully reductive accounts solve this problem but run into the problem of multiple realizability. Recently advocated symptom-network approaches avoid the problem of multiple realizability, but they also run into the causal exclusion problem. Based on a critical analysis of these accounts, we will present our own account according to which mental disorders are (...)
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  14. Rules, Incentivization, and the Ontology of Human Society.Gabriel Guzmán & Cristian Frasser - 2017 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 47 (6):440-462.
    Contemporary discussion about the ontology of society identifies two groups of perspectives. One of them, associated with Searle, includes rules in the inventory of elements that constitute social reality. The other one, associated with Smit, Buekens, and du Plessis, claims that rules can be reduced to more fundamental units. Despite the fact that both perspectives seem equally efficient in describing institutional phenomena, we identify both flaws in the viewpoint that dismisses rules and reasons to prefer the alternative position.
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  15. Predictive Success and Non-Individualist Models in Social Science.Richard Lauer - 2017 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 47 (2):145-161.
    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 (...)
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  16. Social mechanisms and their relationship with the micro-macro distinction.Felipe González - 2016 - Cinta de Moebio 55:16-28.
    The notion of social mechanisms has experienced an increasing use in the social sciences as an alternative explanatory framework to the logic of co-variation present in multivariate analyses, emphasizing the causal explanation of social phenomena over their mere description. This paper seeks two goals. In the one hand, summarise recent literature on social mechanisms in order to clarify their meanings, different modes of use and their contribution to empirical research. In the other hand, we will shed some light onto the (...)
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  17. Towards the Unity of Science Again?Alexander Ruser - 2016 - Epistemology and Philosophy of Science 49 (3):55-69.
    At first glance the Idea of the “Unity of Science" seems to be of interest for historians of science only. However, given the expectations especially social scientists face today, to provide simple answers and feasible solutions to pressing social problems a revival of the idea is not unlikely. In particular “reductionist" ideas, aiming to adopt theoretical and methodological insight from the natural sciences thrive. This puts not only the project but also the very idea of a social philosophy of science (...)
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  18. Is There Such a Thing as a Social Science?Robert Vinten - 2016 - Dókos. Philosophical Review 17:53-86.
    This paper looks at the centrality of action in social disciplines and examines the implications of this for whether social disciplines can be called scientific. Various reasons for calling social disciplines scientific are examined and rejected: (1) the claim that social disciplines are reducible to natural scientific ones, (2) the claim, from Donald Davidson, that reasons for action are to be construed in causal terms, (3) the claim that social disciplines employ, or should employ, the methodologies of the natural sciences. (...)
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  19. Sociology as a Naïve Science: Alfred Schütz and the Phenomenological Theory of Attitudes.Greg Yudin - 2016 - Human Studies 39 (4):547-568.
    Alfred Schütz is often credited with providing sociology with a firm ground derived from phenomenology of science and justifying it as a science operating within natural attitude. Although his project of social science draws extensively on Edmund Husserl’s theory of attitudes, it would be incorrect to assume that Schütz shares with the founder of phenomenology his conception of science. This paper compares Husserl’s and Schütz’s views on the structure and meaning of science and traces the roots of their radical divergence. (...)
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  20. Reductionism in Economics: Intentionality and Eschatological Justification in the Microfoundations of Macroeconomics.Kevin D. Hoover - 2015 - Philosophy of Science 82 (4):689-711.
    Macroeconomists overwhelmingly believe that macroeconomics requires microfoundations, typically understood as a strong eliminativist reductionism. Microfoundations aims to recover intentionality. In the face of technical and data constraints macroeconomists typically employ a representative-agent model, in which a single agent solves the microeconomic optimization problem for the whole economy, and take it to be microfoundationally adequate. The characteristic argument for the representative-agent model holds that the possibility of the sequential elaboration of the model to cover any number of individual agents justifies treating (...)
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  21. Redescription, Reduction, and Emergence.Dave Elder-Vass - 2014 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 44 (6):792-797.
    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.
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  22. Why macroeconomics does not supervene on microeconomics.Brian Epstein - 2014 - Journal of Economic Methodology 21 (1):3-18.
    In recent years, the project of providing microeconomic foundations for macroeconomics has taken on new urgency. Some philosophers and economists have challenged the project, both for the way economists actually approach microfoundations and for more general anti-reductionist reasons. Reductionists and anti-reductionists alike, however, have taken it to be trivial that the macroeconomic facts are exhaustively determined by microeconomic ones. In this paper, I challenge this supposed triviality. I argue that macroeconomic properties do not even globally supervene on microeconomic ones. This (...)
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  23. Beyond Supervenience and Construction.David-Hillel Ruben - 2014 - Journal of Social Ontology 1 (1):121-141.
    If reduction of the social to the physical fail, what options remain for understanding their relationship? Two such options are supervenience and constructivism. Both are vitiated by a similar fault. So the choices are limited: reduction after all, or emergence.
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  24. (1 other version)Emergence and Reduction.Shaun Le Boutillier - 2013 - Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 43 (2):205-225.
    The question of the ontological status of social wholes has been formative to the development of key positions and debates within modern social theory. Intrinsic to this is the contested meaning of the concept of emergence and the idea that the collective whole is in some way more than the sum of its parts. This claim, in its contemporary form, gives exaggerated importance to a simple truism of re-description that concerns all wholes. In this paper I argue that a better (...)
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  25. Response to R. Keith Sawyer.Jens Greve - 2013 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 43 (2):246-256.
    R. Keith Sawyer rightly claimed that the formulation of several cross-level regularities does not disprove the “autonomy” of sciences. Nevertheless, first, this autonomy becomes gradual because cross-level regularities narrow the scope for strong emergence and, second, these examples do not disprove the metaphysical premises of Kim’s critique. Sawyer and I concur on the thesis according to which the proof of strong emergence is in part an empirical question. However, it also depends on the concept of individualism applied whether a description (...)
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  26. Overcoming the Biases of Microfoundationalism: Social Mechanisms and Collective Agents.Tuukka Kaidesoja - 2013 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 43 (3):301-322.
    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 (...)
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  27. (1 other version)Emergence and Reduction.Shaun Le Boutillier - 2013 - Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 43 (2):205-225.
    The question of the ontological status of social wholes has been formative to the development of key positions and debates within modern social theory. Intrinsic to this is the contested meaning of the concept of emergence and the idea that the collective whole is in some way more than the sum of its parts. This claim, in its contemporary form, gives exaggerated importance to a simple truism of re-description that concerns all wholes. In this paper I argue that a better (...)
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  28. Methodological Individualism and Holism in Political Science: A Reconciliation.Christian List & Kai Spiekermann - 2013 - American Political Science Review 107 (4):629-643.
    Political science is divided between methodological individualists, who seek to explain political phenomena by reference to individuals and their interactions, and holists (or nonreductionists), who consider some higher-level social entities or properties such as states, institutions, or cultures ontologically or causally significant. We propose a reconciliation between these two perspectives, building on related work in philosophy. After laying out a taxonomy of different variants of each view, we observe that (i) although political phenomena result from underlying individual attitudes and behavior, (...)
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  29. Reshaping social theory from complexity and ecological perspectives.John Smith & Chris Jenks - 2013 - Thesis Eleven 114 (1):61-75.
    This article argues that Durkheim’s founding insight – uniquely social phenomena – presents us with both a foundation for the discipline of sociology and the risk that the discipline will become isolated. This, we argue, has happened. Our contention is that the emergent social phenomena need to be understood in relation to, but not reduced to, their biological and psychological substrates. Similarly, there are a number of other characteristics, notably of self-organization, which are distinguishing properties of social phenomena but also (...)
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  30. Do customs compete with conditioning? Turf battles and division of labor in social explanation.Todd Jones - 2012 - Synthese 184 (3):407-430.
    We often face a bewildering array of different explanations for the same social facts (e.g. biological, psychological, economic, and historical accounts). But we have few guidelines for whether and when we should think of different accounts as competing or compatible. In this paper, I offer some guidelines for understanding when custom or norm accounts do and don’t compete with other types of accounts. I describe two families of non-competing accounts: (1) explanations of different (but similarly described) facts, and (2) accounts (...)
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  31. Reduction in Sociology.William McGinley - 2012 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 42 (3):370-398.
    In grappling with the micro-macro problem in sociology, philosophers of the field are finding it increasingly useful to associate micro-sociology with theory reduction. In this article I argue that the association is ungrounded and undesirable. Although of a reductive "disposition," micro-sociological theories instantiate something more like "reductive explanation," whereby the causal roles of social wholes are explained in terms of their psychological parts. In this form, micro-sociological theories may actually have a better shot at closing the sociology–psychology explanatory gap, and (...)
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  32. Micro, macro, and mechanisms.Petri Ylikoski - 2012 - In Harold Kincaid (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Social Science. Oxford University Press. pp. 21.
    is chapter takes a fresh look at micro-macro relations in the social sciences from the point of view of the mechanistic account of explanation. Traditionally, micro- macro issues have been assimilated to the problem of methodological individualism. It is not my intention to resurrect this notoriously unfruitful controversy. On the contrary, the main thrust of this chapter is to show that the cul-de-sac of that debate can be avoided if we give up some of its presuppositions. The debate about methodological (...)
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  33. (1 other version)Generating Sense.Bryan Smyth - 2011 - Schutzian Research 3:121-132.
    The aim of phenomenology is to provide a critical account of the origins and genesis of the world. This implies that the standpoint of the phenomenologicalreduction is properly extramundane. But it remains an outstanding task to formulate a credible account of the reduction that would be adequate to this seemingly impossible methodological condition. This paper contributes to rethinking the reduction accordingly. Building on efforts to thematize its intersubjective and corporeal aspects, the reduction is approached as a kind of transcendental practice (...)
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  34. Modéliser le social. Méthodes fondatrices et évolutions récentes.Franck Varenne - 2011 - Paris, France: Dunod.
    Cet ouvrage très pédagogique informe les étudiants sur les méthodes quantitatives les plus classiques comme les plus récentes en sciences sociales, et notamment sur les différentes pratiques de modélisation et de simulation informatique des systèmes sociaux (sciences sociales computationnelles ou modèles informatiques).
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  35. Emergence a la Systems Theory: Epistemological Totalausschluss or Ontological Novelty?P. Y.-Z. Wan - 2011 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 41 (2):178-210.
    In this article, I examine Luhmann’s, Bunge’s and others’ views on emergence, and argue that Luhmann’s epistemological construal of emergence in terms of Totalausschluss (total exclusion) is both ontologically flawed and detrimental to an appropriate understanding of the distinctive features of social emergence. By contrast, Bunge’s rational emergentism, his CESM model, and Wimsatt’s characterization of emergence as nonaggregativity provide a useful framework to investigate emergence. While researchers in the field of social theory and sociology tend to regard Luhmann as the (...)
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  36. Editorial to “Reduction and the Special Sciences”.Mark Colyvan & Stephan Hartmann - 2010 - Erkenntnis 73 (3):293-293.
    Science presents us with a variety of accounts of the world. While some of these accounts posit deep theoretical structure and fundamental entities, others do not. But which of these approaches is the right one? How should science conceptualize the world? And what is the relation between the various accounts? Opinions on these issues diverge wildly in philosophy of science. At one extreme are reductionists who argue that higher-level theories should, in principle, be incorporated in, or eliminated by, the basic-level (...)
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  37. Reduction and the Special Sciences (eds.).Mark Colyvan & Stephan Hartmann - 2010 - Erkenntnis 73:3 (special issue). Edited by Luc Bovens & Stephan Hartmann.
    Science presents us with a variety of accounts of the world. While some of these accounts posit deep theoretical structure and fundamental entities, others do not. But which of these approaches is the right one? How should science conceptualize the world? And what is the relation between the various accounts? Opinions on these issues diverge wildly in philosophy of science. At one extreme are reductionists who argue that higher-level theories should, in principle, be incorporated in, or eliminated by, the basic-level (...)
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  38. (1 other version)The Phenomenological Life-World Analysis and the Methodology of the Social Sciences.Thomas S. Eberle - 2010 - Human Studies 33 (2-3):123-139.
    This Alfred Schutz Memorial Lecture discusses the relationship between the phenomenological life-world analysis and the methodology of the social sciences, which was the central motive of Schutz’s work. I have set two major goals in this lecture. The first is to scrutinize the postulate of adequacy, as this postulate is the most crucial of Schutz’s methodological postulates. Max Weber devised the postulate ‘adequacy of meaning’ in analogy to the postulate of ‘causal adequacy’ (a concept used in jurisprudence) and regarded both (...)
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  39. Causal Mechanisms in the Social Sciences.Peter Hedström & Petri Ylikoski - 2010 - Annual Review of Sociology 36:49–67.
    During the past decade, social mechanisms and mechanism-based ex- planations have received considerable attention in the social sciences as well as in the philosophy of science. This article critically reviews the most important philosophical and social science contributions to the mechanism approach. The first part discusses the idea of mechanism- based explanation from the point of view of philosophy of science and relates it to causation and to the covering-law account of explanation. The second part focuses on how the idea (...)
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  40. Idealizing Reduction: The Microfoundations of Macroeconomics. [REVIEW]Kevin D. Hoover - 2010 - Erkenntnis 73 (3):329 - 347.
    The dominant view among macroeconomists is that macroeconomics reduces to microeconomics, both in the sense that all macroeconomic phenomena arise out of microeconomic phenomena and in the sense that macroeconomic theory—to the extent that it is correct—can be derived from microeconomic theory. More than that, the dominant view believes that macroeconomics should in practice use the reduced microeconomic theory: this is the program of microfoundations for macroeconomics to which the vast majority of macroeconomists adhere. The "microfoundational" models that they actually (...)
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  41. The necessity of a non-reductionist science of politics.James W. Skillen - 2010 - Axiomathes 20 (1):95-106.
    The major tendency within the discipline of political science has been to try to achieve a science modeled on the natural sciences and mathematics, following the pattern of other social sciences. This tendency has led to many reductionistic efforts to explain political behavior in terms of one or more functions, such as power, linguistic, psychical, or the economic. The institutional community of government and citizens—the political community or state—is thus overlooked or reduced to one or more functions. In critique of (...)
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  42. Ontological individualism reconsidered.Brian Epstein - 2009 - Synthese 166 (1):187-213.
    The thesis of methodological individualism in social science is commonly divided into two different claims—explanatory individualism and ontological individualism. Ontological individualism is the thesis that facts about individuals exhaustively determine social facts. Initially taken to be a claim about the identity of groups with sets of individuals or their properties, ontological individualism has more recently been understood as a global supervenience claim. While explanatory individualism has remained controversial, ontological individualism thus understood is almost universally accepted. In this paper I argue (...)
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  43. (1 other version)Introduction to Oakeshott symposium.Leslie Marsh - 2009 - Zygon 44 (1):133-137.
    This paper introduces a symposium discussing Michael Oakeshott's understanding of the relationship of religion, science and politics. Essays by Elizabeth Corey, Timothy Fuller, Byron Kaldis, and Corey Abel are followed by a review of Corey's recent book by Efraim Podoksik.
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  44. Comment : reductionism in the human sciences : a philosopher's game.Robert Shulman & Ian Shapiro - 2009 - In Chrysostomos Mantzavinos (ed.), Philosophy of the social sciences: philosophical theory and scientific practice. New York: Cambridge University Press.
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  45. Reducible and Nonsensical Uses of Game Theory.Boudewijn de Bruin - 2008 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 38 (2):247-266.
    The mathematical tools of game theory are frequently used in the social sciences and economic consultancy. But how do they explain social phenomena and support prescriptive judgments? And is the use of game theory really necessary? I analyze the logical form of explanatory and prescriptive game theoretical statements, and argue for two claims: (1) explanatory game theory can and should be reduced to rational choice theory in all cases; and (2) prescriptive game theory gives bad advice in some cases, is (...)
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  46. Explanations of social phenomena: Competing and complementary accounts.Todd Jones - 2008 - Metaphilosophy 39 (4-5):621-650.
    Abstract: Situations that social scientists and others explain by using concepts like "custom" and "norm" often tend to be situations in which many other kinds of explanations (for example, biological, psychological, economic, historical) seem plausible as well. Do these other explanations compete with the custom or norm explanations, or do they complement them? We need to consider this question carefully and not just assume that various accounts are all permissible at different levels of analysis. In this article I describe two (...)
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  47. Reduction, integration, and the unity of science: Natural, behavioral, and social sciences and the humanities.William P. Bechtel & Andrew Hamilton - 2007 - In T. Kuipers (ed.), Philosophy of Science: Focal Issues (Volume 1 of the Handbook of the Philosophy of Science). Elsevier.
    1. A Historical Look at Unity 2. Field Guide to Modern Concepts of Reduction and Unity 3. Kitcher's Revisionist Account of Unification 4. Critics of Unity 5. Integration Instead of Unity 6. Reduction via Mechanisms 7. Case Studies in Reduction and Unification across the Disciplines.
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  48. For emergence: Refining Archer's account of social structure.Dave Elder-Vass - 2007 - Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 37 (1):25–44.
    The question of social structure and its relationship to human agency remains one of the central problems of social theory. One of the most promising attempts to provide a solution has been Margaret Archer's morphogenetic approach, which invokes emergence to justify treating social structure as causally effective. Archer's argument, however, has been criticised by a number of authors who suggest that the examples she cites can be explained in reductionist terms and thus that they fail to sustain her claim for (...)
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  49. Luhmann and emergentism: Competing paradigms for social systems theory?Dave Elder-Vass - 2007 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 37 (4):408-432.
    Social systems theory has been dominated in recent years by the work of Niklas Luhmann, but there is another strand of systems thinking, which is receiving increasing attention in sociology: emergentism. For emergentism, the core problems of systems thinking are concerned with causation and reductionism; for Luhmann, they are questions of meaning and self-reference. Arguing from an emergentist perspective, the article finds that emergentism addresses its own core problem successfully, while Luhmann's approach is incapable of resolving questions of causation and (...)
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  50. Establishing medical reality: Methodological and metaphysical issues in philosophy of medicine.Harold Kincaid & Jennifer McKitrick (eds.) - 2007 - Springer Publishing Company.
    This volume approaches the philosophy of medicine from the broad naturalist perspective that holds that philosophy must be continuous with, constrained by, and ...
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