I've been inclined to talk about the social world in terms of levels or layers, with a few provisos -- multiple layers, causation across layers, fuzzy boundaries (link, link). But is this perhaps a misleading ontology? Would we be better served by thinking of the social world as "flat" -- involving processes and relations all …
Microfoundations 2.0?
Figure. An orderly ontological hierarchy (University of Leeds (link) Figure. Complex non-reductionist social outcome -- blight The idea that hypotheses about social structures and forces require microfoundations has been around for at least 40 years. Maarten Janssen’s New Palgrave essay on microfoundations documents the history of the concept in economics; link. E. Roy Weintraub was …
Supervenience, isomers, and social isomers
A prior post focused on the question of whether chemistry supervenes upon physics, and I relied heavily on R. F. Hendry's treatment of the way that quantum chemistry attempts to explain the properties of various molecules based on fundamentals of quantum mechanics. This piece raised quite a bit of great discussion, from people who agree …
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Is chemistry supervenient on physics?
Many philosophers of science and physicists take it for granted that "physics" determines "chemistry". Or in terms of the theory of supervenience, it is commonly supposed that the domain of chemistry supervenes upon the domain of fundamental physics. This is the thesis of physicalism: the idea that all causation ultimately depends on the causal powers …
Microfoundations for rules and ascriptions
One of the more convincing arguments for the existence of social facts that lie above the level of individual actors is the social reality of rules and ascriptive identities. Bob and Alice are married by Reverend Green at 7 pm, July 1, 2015. The social fact that Bob and Alice are now married is not …
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Supervenience and the social: Epstein’s critique
Does the social world supervene upon facts about individuals and the physical environment of action? Brian Epstein argues not in several places, most notably in "Ontological Individualism Reconsidered" (2009; link). (I plan to treat Epstein's more recent arguments in his very interesting book The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences in a later post.) The …
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Social structures as entities
Image: first organizational chart (link) One mark of modernity is the fact that we swim in a sea of structures -- states, markets, militaries, employment systems, social networks, taxation systems, and systems of racial and gender disadvantage, to name several. In place of a perhaps mythical pre-modern society in which social life was mediated by …
Emergentism and generationism
media: lecture by Stanford Professor Robert Sapolsky on chaos and reduction Several recent posts have focused on the topic of simulations in the social sciences. An interesting question here is whether these simulation models shed light on the questions of emergence and reduction that frequently arise in the philosophy of the social sciences. In most …
The social world
image: Tuileries, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Toledo Museum of Art exibition It seems self evident, barely worth remarking, that social outcomes are the result of the actions of numbers of ordinary human beings, doing things for their own particular reasons -- finding solutions to the challenges of life that confront them, taking care of themselves and their …
Why emergence?
It is a fair question to ask, whether the concept of emergence is perhaps less important than it initially appears to be. Part of the interest in emergence seems to derive from the impulse by sociologists and philosophers to try to show that there is a legitimate level of the world that is "social", and …
Understanding Society 