New Directions in the Philosophy of Social Science

I am very happy to say that my new book appeared this week, New Directions in the Philosophy of Social Science. Thanks to all the people at Rowman & Littlefield who helped bring it to completion, including especially my editor Sarah Campbell. I hope that the book will be of interest to readers of Understanding Society, in that it is my effort to put into book form many of the ideas and themes that have come in for discussion in the blog over the past several years.

Here is a free sample of the book:

Sample of New Directions

Here is how I describe the genesis of the book:

This book is one of the fruits of an experiment in philosophical writing that I began in 2007. I created Understanding Society as an online venue where I would be able to do a different kind of academic writing. It was to be a “blog”; but, more accurately, it was a venue for “open-source philosophy” where I could formulate my thinking about a series of ideas and topics about the social sciences and the nature of society without attempting to regiment my thoughts into a sequential argument consisting of “chapters” and “books.” I described the work from the start as a “web-based, dynamic monograph on the philosophy of social science,” and it has lived up to this description better than I ever could have hoped. To use a different point of reference, the blog became my laboratory notebook, representing the findings and progress of my thinking about a number of topics about the nature of society and social knowledge.

Here is the table of contents:

Introduction
A Better Social Ontology
Actor-centered Sociology
Social Things
Reduction and Emergence
Generativity and Complexity
Social Causation
Social Realism
References
Index

Key themes include the value of an actor-centered approach to sociology; the unavoidable features of plasticity and heterogeneity of the social world; the sources of stability in higher-level social things; the relationships between levels or strata of the social world; the nature of social causation; and the appeal of scientific realism in the social sciences.

A discussion forum

I would like to continue the social interconnectedness of this work with the international group of readers and scholars who have visited Understanding Society over the years by inviting you to contribute to an ongoing discussion and commentary on topics raised in the book. To that end I've created a new page specifically designed for discussion of topics and issues raised in the book. Please visit here and provide your comments, thoughts, reactions, or criticisms. This site is located at www.ndpss.blogspot.com.