Herbert Simon's The Sciences of the Artificial - 3rd Edition provided an alternative model for thinking about society. We can think of social institutions as partially designed and selected for their organizational properties; so they are different from proteins and planetary systems. Simon is also an important contributor to the study of complexity. So his new chapter …
Behavioral science
(1958-59 class of Fellows at Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences; link) Sometimes the rubric "behavioral science" is used to capture some of the research areas of fields like sociology, anthropology, political science, and social psychology. In some ways this usage is no more than an administrative convenience, a way of grouping disciplines into …
Why does social science matter?
What is the good of social science knowledge? In the natural sciences the answer is often pretty simple and pragmatic: natural science knowledge allows us to predict and control aspects of the natural environment. Physics underlays engineering. That's not always true, and it's not the only reason we value research and theory in physics, chemistry, …
Neighborhood effects
In Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect Robert Sampson provides a very different perspective on the "micro-macro" debate. He rejects the methodologies associated both poles of the debate: methodological individualism ("derive important social outcomes from the choices of rational individuals") and methodological structuralism ("derive important social outcomes from the features of large-scale structures like …
Marketing Wittgenstein
Who made Wittgenstein a great philosopher? Why is the eccentric Austrian now regarded as one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers? What conjunction of events in his life history and the world of philosophy in the early twentieth century led to this accumulating recognition and respect? We might engage in a bit of Panglossian intellectual …
The philosophy of economics
The philosophy of economics intersects with several different areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of science, ethics, and social philosophy. (Dan Hausman is the leading expert in the philosophy of economics. His The Inexact and Separate Science of Economics is a recent contribution.) The field is concerned with methodology, values, and substance. The primary focus of the …
The domain of agent-based models
Agent-based modeling is an intriguing new set of tools for computational social science. The techniques permit us to project forward the system-level effects of a set of assumptions about agent behavior and a given environment. What kinds of real social phenomena are amenable to treatment by the techniques of agent-based modeling? David O'Sullivan and his …
Technical knowledge
There is a kind of knowledge in an advanced mechanical society that doesn't get much attention from philosophers of science and sociologists of science, but it is critical for keeping the whole thing running. I'm thinking here of the knowledge possessed by skilled technicians and fixers -- the people who show up when a complicated …
Political polarization?
Is the American electorate "polarized" with regard to sets of political issues? McCarty, Rosenthal, and Poole accept the common view that we have in fact become more polarized in our politics over the past twenty years, and they offer an interesting theory of what is causing this polarization in Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology …
Response to Little by Dave Elder-Vass
[Dave Elder-Vass accepted my invitation to write a response to my discussion of his recent book, The Reality of Social Construction (link). Elder-Vass is senior lecturer in sociology at Loughborough University and author as well of The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency, discussed here. Thanks, Dave!] Social construction and the reliability of knowledgeby Dave Elder-Vass …
Understanding Society 