Understanding Society

It was suggested in an earlier post that important aspects of an individual's mental furniture are influenced by the concrete histori...

We tend to think of the past century as being a time of great progress when it comes to the quality of life -- for ordinary people as well a...

How do we explain the occurrence of anti-social behavior that we witness in everyday life? For that matter, how do we explain the more commo...

"Society" is a large abstract whole -- more abstract, really, than "nature". We as social beings perceive very little of...

Is there such a thing as a "mentalité" of a people, group, or nation? Take these young people at an Iowa potluck supper, or the tr...

It is interesting to consider what kinds of social knowledge people need in their everyday lives. This is clearly a question of scale. At th...

People bring highly contingent assumptions, beliefs, and frames to their reading of their social worlds. These framing assumptions are presu...

All of us are sociologists, at some level. We have social concepts in terms of which we analyze the social world around us -- "boss,...

The most basic error that is conveyed by the naturalist framework into the premises of sociology—the folk epistemology—that was shared by Du...

Philosophy observes the sciences. But it has also played a role in the formation of the sciences. And this is especially true in the case ...