Frédéric Vandenberghe is an important contributor to the philosophy of critical realism. His interesting book A Philosophical History of German Sociology appeared in 2008, which started life as his PhD thesis in 1994. Like an earlier tradition of historians of sociology (e.g. Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought: Montesquieu, Comte, Marx, de Tocqueville, Sociologists …
Debates about field experiments in the social sciences
Questions about the empirical validation of hypotheses about social causation have been of interest in the past several weeks here. Relevant to that question is Dawn Langan Teele's recent volume, Field Experiments and Their Critics: Essays on the Uses and Abuses of Experimentation in the Social Sciences. The essays in the book make for interesting …
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Realism and empirical reasoning
How should a realist think about confirmation of hypotheses and theories about real social structures and properties? Here is what the Ur-realist Roy Bhaskar has to say about the object of scientific knowledge in his approach in A Realist Theory of Science: [CR] regards the objects of knowledge as the structures and mechanisms that generate …
Mechanisms, experiments, and policies
The social mechanisms approach to the social sciences aligns well with two key intellectual practices, experiments and policies. In an experiment we are interesting in testing whether a given factor has the effect it is thought to have. In a policy design we are interested in affecting an outcome of interest by manipulating some of …
Ethics as culture
Gabriel Abend has recently published The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics, a remarkable book on what seems initially to be a small subject -- a history of the academic field of business ethics. I say "seems", because in Abend's hands this topic turns out to be a superb subject for …
Improving skilled performance
What can ordinary experience tell us about how skilled practitioners can be brought to a high level of competence and performance? Let's say we are interested in teaching a child to play the violin at an advanced level, beginning at the novice level. The outcome we want to influence is the child's ability to play …
Coleman’s house-of-cards theory of structures
image: Henri Bonaventure Monnier, Crowded Restaurant 1860 image: James Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory, p. 245 James Coleman offers a skeptical position on the question of the reality of social structures in his landmark book, Foundations of Social Theory (1990). Coleman advocates for a view of research and theory in sociology that emphasizes the actions …
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Structures, diagrams, rules, and flows
When we refer to the structure of some complex entity, we often intend to capture one of the following ideas: the parts and their arrangements the parts and their interactions the flow of content -- information, money, value, ideas -- through a set of interconnected parts Clouds and monads lack structure -- monads because they …
Globalization and the planetary knowledge business
It is a commonplace that modern social and economic systems are intensely knowledge-based, and that the centers of knowledge production are no longer exclusively located in the industrialized north and west. Further, anyone who follows a Twitter feed knows that knowledge centers around the world are connected at the speed of light (more or …
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Three concepts of social structure
There is an important ambiguity in the idea of social structure that needs to be addressed. The word is sometimes used to refer to functioning entities or units within society. The state is a structure within society; likewise is the system of public education. A corporation is a structure, and so is the feature of the economic …
Understanding Society 