Several recent themes come together in Ron Jacobs' very interesting 2000 book, Race, Media, and the Crisis of Civil Society: From Watts to Rodney King (Cambridge Cultural Social Studies). There is the recurring theme of racial separation in American society, this time with respect to divergent perceptions of important historical events. There is the role of …
Philosophy and social knowledge
Throughout this blog I’ve addressed a very large subject: what is involved in understanding society? What sorts of ontological assumptions do we need to make as we attempt to analyze and explain social processes? What is involved in explaining some of the social outcomes we are most interested in? How do we provide empirical confirmation …
Mundane knowledge: Toronto street people
There is a lot of interesting stuff we encounter every day, if we stop to think. Often we don't have the knowledge necessary to make sense of it, so it remains interesting but opaque. And plainly each vignette has a dense set of social facts standing behind it that need to be teased out if …
Interdisciplinarity at the AAS
I'm attending the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Toronto, and it's a good working example of a non-discipline that brings together a wide range of disciplines and topics. But what is it that creates an affinity among all these scholars? It's certainly not methodology. There are financial specialists in attendance alongside …
Are mechanisms complex?
Source: D. Little, "Causal explanation in the social sciences" (link) A causal mechanism is (i) a particular configuration of conditions and processes that (ii) always or normally leads from one set of conditions to an outcome (iii) through the properties and powers of the events and entities in the domain of concern. This captures the …
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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Understanding Society 