Understanding Society

Carl Hempel published his sole contribution to the philosophy of history in 1942, almost exactly 70 years ago. The article is "The Fun...

Stephen Steinberg contributed a provocative but important piece to  Boston Review  a year ago on current academic thinking about race and po...

Throughout this blog I’ve addressed a very large subject: what is involved in understanding society? What sorts of ontological assumptions ...

A recent post examined the Akerlof and Kranton formalization of identity within a rational choice framework.  It is worth considering how t...

There is a lot of interesting stuff we encounter every day, if we stop to think. Often we don't have the knowledge necessary to make se...

I'm attending the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Toronto, and it's a good working example of a non-disciplin...

Source: D. Little, "Causal explanation in the social sciences" ( link ) How can we distinguish between causal mechanisms and exte...

George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton have collaborated for over ten years on a simple idea: is it possible to introduce the concept of social i...

James Coleman's work has had a major influence on an important strand of thinking in the social sciences since the publication of Found...

John Levi Martin argues in The Explanation of Social Action , among other things, that we need to understand the social world through the w...