Does Wittgenstein's philosophy in the Philosophical Investigations have anything distinctive to add to better ways of understanding society? And is there anything in Wittgenstein's philosophy that contributes to the philosophy of social science? (These are different questions, even though they seem to be closely related; the first question is conceptual or ontological, whereas the second …
More on what can be explained
A previous posting argued that most social facts don't admit of social explanation because they are too fundamentally conjunctural or too boringly ordinary. Let's extend this thought by considering what sorts of social facts do admit of explanation. One obvious category is the example of a perplexing mid-range social regularity. Why do used cars usually …
Thinking as a structured process
For some reason I was reminded of a classic and challenging article by Karl Lashley, "The Problem of Serial Order in Behavior" (1951). As I recall, the article was a pivotal contribution to new and productive thinking in what became "cognitive psychology." And it was one of the central components on Noam Chomsky's earliest attacks …
Agendas for Chinese sociology
The challenge for Chinese sociology is the challenge of Chinese society. Chinese social sciences are presently in a period of deep uncertainty. Marxist ideas about method and theory are no longer governing, and new paradigms have not yet taken full form. This transition is especially important because of the magnitude and novelty of the social …
Piecemeal empirical assessment of social theories
The philosophy of science devotes a large fraction of its wattage to this question: what is the logic of empirical confirmation for scientific beliefs? (A good short introduction is Samir Okasha, Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction.) In the natural sciences this question became entangled with the parochial fact about the natural sciences, that …
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More on knowing poverty
Mike Poole has picked up on the question of "knowing poverty", an earlier topic in UnderstandingSociety, in a very interesting post on his blog, greetingsearthlings. He adds a really valuable international perspective on the topic of how we understand poverty if we don't experience it directly -- he's Australian, trained in Southeast Asian Studies at …
Realism for the social sciences?
Scientific realism is the idea that scientific theories provide descriptions of the world that are approximately true. This view implies a correspondence theory of truth -- the idea that the world is separate from the concepts that we use to describe it. And it implies some sort of theory of scientific rationality -- a theory …
Chuck Tilly
Along with many others, I was saddened today to learn that Chuck Tilly has died after a long fight with cancer. His passing is a very sad loss for his family and for the many scholars and friends who were so influenced by his ongoing thinking and writing. And there are hundreds or thousands of …
Philosophy and society
How does philosophy intersect with the social world? How does philosophical thinking contribute to better understanding of society? (At the right we see Jurgen Habermas teaching philosophy in 1960.) It is possible that philosophy is not a well-defined discipline. But philosophers regard themselves as having something of a method, and something of a subject matter. …
Social change in rural China
Contemporary China is a vivid demonstration of the fact that sociology is not a "finished" science. The processes of change that are underway in both rural and urban settings are novel and contingent. Existing sociological theory does not provide a basis for conceptualizing these processes according to a few simple templates -- modernization, urbanization, structural …
Understanding Society 