To explain something is to provide a true account of the causes and circumstances that brought it about. There is of course more to say on the subject, but this is the essential part of the story. And this normative account of explanation should work as well for investigations created within the framework of critical realism as …
Social science or social studies?
A genuinely difficult question is this: does the idea of a rigorous "social science" really make sense, given what we know of the nature of the social world, the nature of human agency, and the nature of historical change? There are of course large areas of social inquiry that involve genuine observation and measurement: demography, …
The soft side of critical realism
Critical realism has appealed to a range of sociologists and political scientists, in part because of the legitimacy it renders for the study of social structures and organizations. However, many of the things sociologists study are not "things" at all, but rather subjective features of social experience -- mental frameworks, identities, ideologies, value systems, knowledge …
Discovering the nucleus
In the past year or so I've been reading a handful of fascinating biographies and histories involving the evolution of early twentieth-century physics, paying attention to the individuals, the institutions, and the ideas that contributed to the making of post-classical physics. The primary focus is on the theory of the atom and the nucleus, and …
Inductive reasoning and the philosophy of science
I've just finished reading Sharon Bertsch McGrayne's book on Bayesian statistics, The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy. McGrayne presents a very interesting story of the advancement of a scientific idea over a very long period (1740s through …
Continue reading "Inductive reasoning and the philosophy of science"
Predicting, forecasting, and superforecasting
I have expressed a lot of reservation about the feasibility of prediction of large, important outcomes in the social world (link, link, link). Here are a couple of observations drawn from these earlier posts: We sometimes think that there is fundamental stability in the social world, or at least an orderly pattern of development to …
Continue reading "Predicting, forecasting, and superforecasting"
Is the mind/body problem relevant to social science?
Is solving the mind-body problem crucial to providing a satisfactory sociological theory? No, it isn't, in my opinion. But Alex Wendt thinks otherwise in Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology. In fact, he thinks a solution to the mind-body problem is crucial to a coherent social science. Which is to say, …
Continue reading "Is the mind/body problem relevant to social science?"
How to do cephalapod philosophy
How should researchers attempt to investigate non-human intelligence? The image above raises difficult questions. The octopus is manipulating (tenticlating?) the Rubik's cube. But there are a raft of questions that are difficult to resolve on the basis of simple inductive observation. And some of those questions are as much conceptual as they are empirical. Is …
Range of reactions to realism about the social world
My recent post on realism in the social realm generated quite a bit of commentary, which I'd like to address here. Brad Delong offered an incredulous response -- he seems to think that any form of scientific realism is ridiculous (link). He refers to the predictive success of Ptolemy's epicycles, and then says, "But just …
Continue reading "Range of reactions to realism about the social world"
The case for realism in the social realm
Image. Orderly chaos in flight path of ocean-foraging albatross The case for scientific realism in the case of physics, microbiology, and chemistry is a strong one. The theories of physics, biology, and chemistry postulate unobservable entities, forces, and properties. These hypotheses are specified in a fair degree of precision. They are not individually testable, because …
Understanding Society 