Daniel Little
We might say that a political philosophy is a formulation of the normative ideals that the philosopher holds to be primary in implementing the moral and social facts of "assemblages of free individuals in society, with conflicts of interest and belief". How should such a society be organized? What values should it aspire to realize …
Continue reading "A political philosophy for an inclusive multicultural democracy"
In his influential article "A definition of physicalism" (1993) Philip Pettit attempts to formulate a consistent and coherent account of physicalism as an ontology of the world. I believe that we can define a possibly true, substantive doctrine which holds, roughly, that the empirical world 'contains just what a true complete physics would say it …
An earlier post considered Dave Elder-Vass’s very interesting treatment of the contemporary digital economy. In Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy Elder-Vass argues that the vast economic significance of companies like Google, FaceBook, and Amazon in today's economy is difficult to assimilate within the conceptual framework of Marx’s foundational ideas about capitalism, constructed as they were around …
[Dave Elder-Vass accepted my invitation to write a response to my discussion of his recent book, Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy (link). Elder-Vass is Reader in sociology at Loughborough University and author as well of The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency and The Reality of Social Construction, discussed here and here. Dave has …
One of the important developments in engineering and management thinking since World War II is the value of approaching large problems as systems rather than simply as a sum of separable components. Designing a ballpoint pen is very different from designing an aircraft or a fire control system; in the latter cases there are multiple …
Continue reading "Systems management and the War on Poverty"
The relationship between feudalism and the origins of capitalism was of great interest to Marx. Here is one way that Marx puts the idea in The Poverty of Philosophy: M. Proudhon the economist understands very well that men make cloth, linen, or silk materials in definite relations of production. But what he has not understood …
Here is a fascinating data visualization experiment by moovel lab testing a piece of ancient wisdom, "All roads lead to Rome" (link). The experiment is discussed in the CityLab blog of the Atlantic. It is not a full map of the auto routes of Europe; instead, it is a construction of the routes that exist …
Image: Yellow River, Qing Dynasty Image: Free and Slave States, United States 1850 One approach to causal explanation involves seeking out the mechanisms and processes that lead to particular outcomes. McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly illustrate this approach in their treatment of contentious politics in Dynamics of Contention, and the field of contentious politics is in …
Continue reading "Large causes and component causal mechanisms"
When we refer to the structure of some complex entity, we often intend to capture one of the following ideas: the parts and their arrangements the parts and their interactions the flow of content -- information, money, value, ideas -- through a set of interconnected parts Clouds and monads lack structure -- monads because they …
There is an important ambiguity in the idea of social structure that needs to be addressed. The word is sometimes used to refer to functioning entities or units within society. The state is a structure within society; likewise is the system of public education. A corporation is a structure, and so is the feature of the economic …
Understanding Society 