Now that I've played with the Google Ngrams tool a little, I continue to think it's a powerful window into a lot of interesting questions. But I also see that there are patterns that emerge that are plainly spurious, and surely do not correspond to real changes in language, culture, or collective interest over time. …
Diagrams and economic thought
source: The Paretian System (link) The most vivid part of any undergraduate student's study of economics is probably the diagrams. Economists since Walras, Pareto, and Marshall have found it useful to express their theories and hypotheses making use of two-axis diagrams, allowing for very economical formulation of fundamental relationships. Supply-demand curves, production functions, and a …
French philosophy?
Is there such a thing as "French philosophy"? Or is philosophy a purely universal discipline, raising the same abstract questions no matter whether the philosopher is Chinese, English, French, or Brazilian? One way to address this question is to consider the collective intellectual practice of "philosophy" from the point of view of sociology -- that …
Criteria for assessing economic models
How can we assess the epistemic warrant of an economic model that purports to represent some aspects of economic reality? The general problem of assessing the credibility of an economic model can be broken down into more specific questions concerning the validity, comprehensiveness, robustness, reliability, and autonomy of the model. Here are initial definitions of …
Mechanisms of contention reconsidered
Social contention theorists Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly created a great deal of interest in the "mechanisms" approach to social explanation with the publication of their Dynamics of Contention in 2001. The book advocated for several important new angles of approach to the problem of analyzing and explaining social contention: to disaggregate the object of …
Intellectual work
It is interesting to think about the work that intellectuals do. Basically, they take on thought problems -- what is justice? How does a market economy work? Why do used cars sell for less than their real value? They gather the theories and hypotheses that they have encountered and studied. They look for a new …
Anthropology as a discipline
Several posts have focused recently on the meandering pathways through which the social science disciplines have developed in the past century or so -- within and across nations (link, link). Anthropology is a particularly interesting example because of its proximity to power and empire. And Gustavo Lins Ribeiro and Arturo Escobar's recent World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations …
Links between literature and the social sciences
Some novelists take as part of their task the description and evocation of certain social realities. James Baldwin captured one slice of African-American life in the 1950s and 60s. Tim O'Brien captured aspects of infantry life in Vietnam in The Things They Carried. And Tolstoy caught much about social attitudes and relations in elite Russia …
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How many Geertz’s?
Clifford Geertz's contributions are wide-ranging, in a couple of ways. He wrote about North Africa as well as Indonesia; and he touched on Islam as well as water systems. So there was both geographical as well as topical diversity in his research life. But here is another dimension of range: Geertz demonstrated a surprisingly wide …
Area studies and social science theories
image: The ruins of Bagan, Myanmar Understanding a particular place seems to involve a very specific kind of knowledge and research. It involves understanding the unique combination of historical circumstances, social processes, cultural formations, and unique institutions that give rise to the current complex social reality. And yet it also involves an effort to understand …
Understanding Society 