Daniel Little
There was a time in the philosophy of science when it may have been believed that scientific knowledge develops in a logical, linear way from observation and experiment to finished theory. This was something like the view presupposed by the founding logical positivists like Carnap and Reichenbach. But we now understand that the creation of …
Continue reading "The sociology of scientific discipline formation"
The idea that there is a stark separation between many of our ideas of the social world, on the one hand, and the realities of the social world in which we live is an old one. We think "fairness and equality", but what we get is exploitation, domination, and opportunity-capture. And there is a reasonable …
I've just had the singular opportunity of participating in the habilitation examination of Gianluca Manzo at the Sorbonne, based on his excellent manuscript on the relevance of agent-based models for justifying causal claims in the social sciences. Manzo is currently a research fellow in sociology at CNRS in Paris (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), …
When philosophers think of action they generally have in mind a combination of intentionality and simple motor movements. "John flips the switch to turn on the lights." But a great deal of human action is substantially more complex than this. Skilled bodily performance -- playing the piano, returning a tennis serve, fabricating a guitar -- …
Traditional cognitive science has been largely organized around the idea of the brain as a computing device and cognitive systems as functionally organized systems of data-processing. There is an emerging alternative to this paradigm that is described as "4E Cognition," where the four "E's" refer to cognition that is embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended. For example, …
image: Bruegel, The Dutch Proverbs (1559) When philosophers of the social sciences take seriously the importance of individual action within the social realm, we often look in the direction of methodological individualism and the methods of "aggregation dynamics". That is, agent-centered theorists are usually interested in finding ways of climbing the upward strut of Coleman's …
Continue reading "The place for thick theories of the actor in philosophy"
One of the most interesting authorities on social models and simulations is Scott Page. This month he published a major book on this topic, The Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You, and it is a highly valuable contribution. The book corresponds roughly to the content of Page's very …
I have always found biographies a particularly interesting source of learning and stimulation. A recent example is a biography and celebration of Muthuvel Kalaignar Karunanidhi published in a recent issue of the Indian semi-weekly Frontline. Karunanidhi was an enormously important social and political leader in India for over sixty years in the Dravidian movement in …
Scientific fields are shaped by many apparently contingent and capricious facts. This is one of the key insights of science and technology studies. And yet eventually it seems that scientific communities succeed in going beyond the limitations of these somewhat arbitrary starting points. The human sciences are especially vulnerable to this kind of arbitrariness, and …
The Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan hosted an intensive day-long training on some of the basics of machine learning for graduate students and interested faculty and staff. Jake Hofman, a Microsoft researcher who also teaches this subject at Columbia University, was the instructor, and the session was both …
