An earlier post reviewed Theda Skocpol's effort in States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China to provide a comparative, structural account of the occurrence of social revolutions. There I suggested that the account is too deterministic and too abstract. It gives the impression, perhaps undeserved, that there are only a …
Skocpol on the Chinese Revolution
(Sources: States and Social Revolutions, pp. 155, 282) In States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China (1979) Theda Skocpol set out to discover a causal analysis of the occurrence of social revolution, and she offered case-study narratives of the major revolutions in France, Russia, and China. She provides a 54-page narrative …
Mechanisms and methodology
In its origin the causal mechanisms approach (link) is chiefly an answer to the question, “what is a good social explanation?”. So it turns out that much of the mechanisms discussion has taken place within the philosophy of science, especially the philosophy of social science and the philosophy of biology. The question I’d like to formulate …
Mechanisms and intellectual movements
I am particularly interested in the idea that we can explain social outcomes by identifying the social mechanisms that (often, typically, occasionally) bring them about. I also find the evolution of science and systems of ideas to be particularly fascinating within contemporary sociology, in that this aspect of human life embraces both rationally directed thought …
Guest post by Ruth Groff on causal powers
Ruth Groff is Assistant Professor of Political Science at St. Louis University. She specializes in the philosophical underpinnings of Western social and political thought. She is author of Powers and Capacities in Philosophy: The New Aristotelianism (2012, with John Greco), Ontology Revisited: Metaphysics in Social and Political Philosophy (Ontological Explorations) (2012), and Revitalizing Causality: Realism …
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ANT and the philosophy of social science
What does Actor-Network Theory have to add to the kinds of issues in the foundations of the social sciences that are of interest here? ANT is primarily associated with Bruno Latour (Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts), John Law, and Manuel DeLanda (A New Philosophy of Society: …
How do the poles of current PSS interact?
An earlier post offered a diagram of current topics in the philosophy of social science. The three poles of this diagram were analytical sociology, critical realism, and actor-network theory. Here I would like to look more closely at how these polar perspectives interact with each other. To start, it is clear that these three beacons …
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New philosophy of social science
The philosophy of social science is a living field with several distinct areas of growth and dozens of talented young contributors bringing fresh ideas and rigorous thinking. (Here are a number of earlier posts documenting this activity; link, link, link, link.) It sometimes happens in a field of philosophy that a period of involution sets in, …
International relations and complexity theory
Hilton Root has published some very interesting ideas about systems thinking in international relations theory in Dynamics among Nations: The Evolution of Legitimacy and Development in Modern States. Here he offers an approach to social, political, and economic change through a set of ideas that are not yet strongly integrated into IR theory — the perspective …
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What kind of realist?
I've always felt that scientific realism is almost self-evidently true. Scientific theories and hypotheses put forward ideas that go beyond the evidence of direct experience. They postulate the existence of entities and forces that cannot be directly observed but whose effects can be teased out through the assumptions we have made about their characteristics. And …
Understanding Society 