Understanding Society

Historians are sometimes interested in comparing two cases or events in order to discover something of historical importance -- common causa...

Let's suppose that this statement about urban-rural differences in educational levels summarizes census data by calculating the average ...

Marx's theory of historical materialism came with a few central concepts, a large hypothesis, and a heuristic for social research. The ...

Does social science require systems of classification? From Jorge Luis Borges' description of a fictional Chinese classification of anim...

The social sciences consist of a variety of disciplines, subject areas, and methods, and there is no reason to expect that these disciplines...

Let us say that knowledge is "a set of true statements based on compelling reasons." (This is the same as the familiar definition...

Are there such things as "social structures"? In what do they consist? What sorts of social powers do they exercise? This...

Rational choice theory is a mid-level theory of human agency, intended to capture core features of human decision-making in order to provide...

Rational choice theory is a powerful foundation for thinking about social behavior (at least in its moderate versions). People have beliefs...

Is there a reason or rationale underlying the scope and methods of the social science disciplines? Or is the current division of the subject...