James Coleman's work has had a major influence on an important strand of thinking in the social sciences since the publication of Foundations of Social Theory in 1990. He was a somewhat iconoclastic sociologist, in that his approach to social theory was grounded in an actor-centered view of the social world. He was a rational-choice theorist …
Ordinary and theoretical knowledge of capitalism
John Levi Martin argues in The Explanation of Social Action, among other things, that we need to understand the social world through the ways it is experienced by participants. "Sociology and its near kin have adopted an understanding of theoretical explanation that privileges 'third-person' explanations and, in particular, have decided that the best explanation is a …
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Response to Little by John Levi Martin
[John Levi Martin accepted my invitation to write a response to my discussion of his Explanation of Social Action (link). John is professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and author of Social Structures in addition to ESA. Thanks, John!] Response to Littleby John Levi Martin The Explanation of Social Action (henceforward, ESA) is a book …
Value-free economics?
A recent volume by Vivian Walsh and Hilary Putnam, The End of Value-Free Economics, brings to a fine point a line of argument that has been brewing for fifteen years: is the logical positivist insistence on separating "fact-based" science from "value-based" ethics any longer a tenable one? Most particularly, are there now compelling reasons for declaring that …
Levi Martin on explanation
John Levi Martin's The Explanation of Social Action is a severe critique of the role of "theory" in the social sciences. He thinks our uses of this construct follow from a bad conception of social explanation: we explain something by showing how it relates (often through law-like processes) to something radically different from the thing to …
Conversational implicatures and presuppositions
There was in the 1960s a theory of the understanding of language that portrayed the process as a formal act of decoding. Language was described as a system of syntax and semantics, and understanding a sentence involved beginning with the meaningful elements (words), applying the generative rules of syntax and semantics, and arriving at a …
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Race and the Chicago School
The Chicago School of sociology has often gotten a fair amount of credit for bringing the study of race into the academic discipline of sociology in the early decades of the twentieth century. Robert Ezra Park, in particular, is taken as a pioneer with his theories of a "race relations cycle", his work with Booker …
Social subjectivities
What role do subjectivities play in the composition of society? How does subjectivity influence social functioning, social structure, and social relationships? By subjectivity I mean considerations that have to do with the mental state of an observer or participant: for example, stereotypes about race or religion, propositional attitudes, attitudes towards other people, understandings of social …
Microfoundations and meso causation
I take the view that social causation requires microfoundations. And I hold that meso causal explanations are legitimate. How are these two views compatible? The key is the role that we expect reasoning about micro-level events to play in the explanation itself. The various versions of methodological individualism -- microeconomics, analytical sociology, Elster's theories of …
Neighborhood effects as meso-causes
A very interesting and current sociological study of "meso"-social causation can be found in the literature on neighborhood effects over the past 15 years or so. Robert Sampson and various colleagues have offered striking new analyses and arguments that establish the importance of geo-social neighborhoods on the occurrence of a variety of important social behaviors. …
Understanding Society 