Understanding Society

Let's think again about the semantics of causal ascriptions. Suppose that we want to know what  caused a building crane to collapse ...

I am particularly interested in the idea that we can explain social outcomes by identifying the social mechanisms that (often, typically,...

Image: the owl of Minerva In spite of their reputations as historical determinists, Hegel and Marx each had their own versions of skepticism...

A debate has been raging in the discipline of political science for at least a decade, over the nature of the scientific status and method...

Much social behavior is chaotic, in that it simply emerges from the independent choices of numerous agents during a period of time. It is an...

Is the flea market a helpful analogy for understanding the social world ( "The Dis-unity of Science" )? Does it serve to provide ...

One of the central goals of Vienna Circle philosophy of science was the idea of the unity of science. The idea included at least two separab...

Logical positivism favored a theory of scientific explanation that focused on subsumption under general laws. We explain an outcome by iden...

Are there social regularities? Is there anything like a "law of nature" that governs or describes social phenomena? My view is th...

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 ...

What is the relationship between facts about society and facts about individuals? Reducibility means that the statements of one scientific d...

Ultimately social phenomena are the aggregate result of the behavior of socially constituted persons who are acting within the context of lo...