Daniel Little
image: micro-structure of a nanomaterial (link) Are there strong logical relationships among the ideas of emergence, microfoundations, generative dependency, and supervenience? It appears that there are. The diagram represents the social world as a laminated set of layers of entities, processes, powers, and laws. Entities at L2 are composed of or caused by some set …
Continue reading "Are emergence and microfoundations contraries?"
For quite a few years I have found the concept of microfoundations to be central for thinking about relationships across levels of social and individual activity. Succinctly, I have argued that, while it is perfectly legitimate to formulate theories and hypotheses about the properties and causal powers of higher-level social entities, it is necessary that …
The 40th annual meeting of SSHA took place in Baltimore this weekend. The Social Science History Association is an especially rewarding academic meeting for scholars interested in the intersection between historical processes and social scientific research tools and explanations. The rationale for the organization is to provide a venue for bringing together the study of specific …
This week marks the end of the eighth year of Understanding Society. This year passed the 1000 mark — the blog is now up to 1,029 posts, or well over one million words. The blog continues to be a very good venue for me for developing and sharing ideas about the foundations of the social sciences …
youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtTNH--oGi4 People relate to each other on the basis of a set of moral and cognitive frameworks -- ideas about the social world and how others are expected to behave -- and on the basis of fairly specific scripts that prescribe their own behavior in given stylized circumstances. It is evident that there are …
youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYdf8bUSFg0 Here I'll follow up on the idea of using an epidemiological model to capture the effects of political mobilization through organization. One of the sample models provided by the NetLogo library is EpiDEM Basic (link). This model simulates an infectious disease moving through a population through person-to-person contact. We can adapt this model …
Continue reading "Modifying an epidemiological model for party recruitment"
Image: Three Mile Island control room There isn't a lot of cross-over between the microfoundations literature (Peter Hedstrom, Dissecting the Social: On the Principles of Analytical Sociology) and the causal-powers literature (Greco and Groff, Powers and Capacities in Philosophy: The New Aristotelianism). People who advocate the importance of microfoundations in the social sciences are usually …
One defect of the ABMs considered in the prior post about the emergence of civil conflict is that they do not incorporate the workings of organizations into the dynamics of mobilization. And yet scholars like Tilly (Dynamics of Contention) and Bianco (Peasants without the Party: Grassroots Movements in Twentieth Century China) make it clear that …
Source: Pfautz and Salwen (link) An earlier post addressed the question of the dynamics through which a stable community consisting of multiple groups may begin to polarize and fission into antagonisms and conflict. I speculated there that the tools of agent-based modeling might be of use here. What I had in mind was something like …
source: Du Shiyu and Qi Jiayan, "Multi-agent Modeling and Simulation on Group Polarization Behavior in Web 2.0" An earlier post drew attention to the fact that there are sometimes powerful forces leading to the disintegration of previously peaceful populations of people into violent opposition across groups (link). A population concentrated in a geographical space (city, …
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