Daniel Little
image: Carnap's notes on Frege's Begriffsschrift seminar Part of Manuel DeLanda's work in Assemblage Theory is his hope to clarify and extend the way that we understand the ontological ideas associated with assemblage. He introduces a puzzling wrinkle into his discussion in this book -- the idea that a concept is "equipped with a variable …
Continue reading "DeLanda on concepts, knobs, and phase transitions"
image: Anasazi petroglyphs at Newspaper Rock This week marks the ninth anniversary of Understanding Society -- 1105 posts to date, or over 1.1 million words. According to Blogger, over 7 million pageviews have flowed across screens, tablets, and phones since 2010. The blog has been an ideal forum for me to continue to develop new …
Early in his theoretical treatise of rational-choice sociology Foundations of Social Theory, James Coleman introduces a diagram of different kinds of social action (34). This diagram is valuable because it provides a finely granulated classification of kinds of social action, differentiated by the relationships that each kind stipulates among individuals within the interaction. Here is …
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Does economic theory provide anything like a concrete set of reliable policies for creating sustained economic growth in a middle-income country? Some contemporary economists believe that it is possible to answer this question in the affirmative. However, I don't find this confidence justified. One such economist is Justin Yifu Lin. Lin is a leading Chinese …
Where do institutions come from? And what kinds of social forces are at work to stabilize them once they are up and running? These are questions that historical institutionalists like Kathleen Thelen have considered in substantial depth (link, link, link). But the rational-choice paradigm has also offered some answers to these questions as well. The basic …
Manuel DeLanda has been a prominent exponent of the theory of assemblage for English-speaking readers for at least ten years. His 2006 book A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity has been discussed numerous times in this blog (link, link, link). DeLanda has now published a new treatment of the subject, Assemblage …
The post-war German historian Reinhart Koselleck made important contributions to the theory of history that are largely independent from the other sources of Continental philosophy of history mentioned elsewhere in this blog. (Koselleck’s contributions are ably discussed in Niklas Olsen's History in the Plural: An Introduction to the Work of Reinhart Koselleck (2012).) Koselleck contributed to …
Paul Draus and Juliette Roddy have been involved in street-level sociological research in Detroit for over ten years. Roddy is an economist and a member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Ojibwe Indians. She studies substance use, recovery and re-entry in the city of Detroit and teaches health policy and health economics in the …
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I am very happy to say that my new book appeared this week, New Directions in the Philosophy of Social Science. Thanks to all the people at Rowman & Littlefield who helped bring it to completion, including especially my editor Sarah Campbell. I hope that the book will be of interest to readers of Understanding …
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One reasonable way of thinking about the most fundamental goal of international economic development is to increase the level of human happiness in all countries, and to reduce the degree of inequality of happiness within and across countries. But, as Aristotle asked several millennia ago, what is happiness? And how can we measure it, either …
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