Daniel Little
defining the social, conceptual frameworks, heterogeneity, plasticity, contingency
Critical realism proposes an approach to the social world that pays particular attention to objective and material features of the social realm -- property relations, impersonal institutional arrangements, supra-individual social structures. Between structure and agent, CR seems most often to lean towards structures rather than consciously feeling and thinking agents. And so one might doubt …
Continue reading "Social consciousness and critical realism"
Take a typical day in a major city -- a busy street with a subway stop, a park, a coffee bar, and a large consumer financial office. There are several thousand people in view, mostly in ones and twos. Some people are rushing to an appointment with a doctor, a job interview, a drug dealer …
One of the more intriguing currents of social science research today is the field of complexity theory. Scientists like John Holland (Complexity: A Very Short Introduction), John Miller and Scott Page (Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life), and Joshua Epstein (Generative Social Science: Studies in Agent-Based Computational Modeling) make bold …
The approach to social and historical research that I favor is one that pays attention to the heterogeneity and contingency of social processes. It advises that social and historical researchers should disaggregate the large patterns they start with and try to identify the multiple underlying mechanisms, causes, motivations, movements, and contingencies that came together …
Continue reading "Ideologies, policies, and social complexity"
In an earlier post I considered the topic of phase transitions as a possible source of emergent phenomena (link). I argued there that phase transitions are indeed interesting, but don't raise a serious problem of strong emergence. Tarun Menon considers this issue in substantial detail in the chapter he co-authored with Craig Callender in The Oxford …
Continue reading "Menon and Callender on the physics of phase transitions"
We have long given up on the idea that history has direction or a fundamental motor driving change. There are no iron laws of history, and there is no fundamental driver of history, whether market, class struggle, democracy, or "modernization." And there is no single path forward into a more modern world. At the same …
How does a field of phenomena come into focus as a subject of scientific study? When we want to know about weather, we can identify a relatively small number of variables that represent the whole of the topic -- temperature, air pressure, wind velocity, rainfall. And we can pick out the aspects of physics that …
Gianluca Pozzoni is a PhD Candidate in Political Studies at the University of Milan, Italy. His interests span the foundations of the social sciences, and he has written on Marxism, methodological individualism, and the status of social structures. Thank you, Gianluca, for contributing this stimulating guest post. BY GIANLUCA POZZONI Daniel Little’s recent post on …
Continue reading "Guest post by Gianluca Pozzoni on political entities"
Alexander Wendt proposes a radical idea in his Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology: that we should reconsider fundamentals of the social sciences to reflect emerging research on "quantum consciousness" and cognition. He describes his aim in these terms: In this book I explore the possibility that this [classical physics] foundational …
diagram: Erik Olin Wright, The Value Controversy and Social Research (link) Margaret Archer's research collaboration on topics concerning the theory of morphogenesis continues with the publication of the third volume in the Social Morphogenesis series, Generative Mechanisms Transforming the Social Order. (The first two volumes have been treated in earlier posts; link, link.) Like the earlier volumes, this volume offers …
Understanding Society 