Understanding Society

One thing that is clear from the pandemic crisis that is shaking the world is the crucial need we have for models that allow us to est...

Quite a few posts here have focused on the question of emergence in social ontology, the idea that there are causal processes and powers...

Anyone interested in the topic of causal mechanisms will be interested in the appearance of Stuart Glennan and Phyllis Illari's The ...

Social change and historical events are highly contingent processes, in a specific sense: they are the result of multiple causal inf...

The approach to social and historical research that I favor is one that pays attention to the heterogeneity and contingency of social ...

There is a long history of the use of directed causal diagrams to represent hypotheses about causation. Can the mathematics and graphical...

The social mechanisms approach to the social sciences aligns well with two key intellectual practices, experiments and policies. In an expe...

Establishing causal relationships within the fabric of the social world is more challenging than in the biological or physical-chemica...

source: Alex Cooley, "America and Empire" ( link ) One of the most fundamental ideas underlying the philosophy of social scie...

It is fairly well accepted that there are social mechanisms underlying various patterns of the social world — free-rider problems, commun...