Daniel Little
One of the impulses of the early exponents of analytic philosophy was to provide strict logical simplifications of hitherto vague or indefinite ideas. There was a strong priority placed on being clear about the meaning of philosophical concepts, and more generally, about "meaning" in language simpliciter. Here are the opening paragraphs of Rudolf Carnap’s The Logical Structure …
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Image: names of Holocaust victims It sometimes seems that some questions in history are resolved, finished, and understood. At various times the industrial revolution, the outbreak of World War I, and the French war in Indochina fell in this category. And then a new generation of historians comes along and questions the assumptions and certainties …
Continue reading "New thinking about European genocide and the Holocaust"
Image: a poor solution to the stopping problem In earlier posts I discussed the question of "rational plans of life" (link, link, link, link) and argued that standard theories of rational decision making under uncertainty don't do well in this context. I argued instead that rationality in navigating and building a life is not analogous to remodeling your …
Continue reading "Rational life plans and the stopping problem"
The method of randomized controlled trials (RCT) is often thought to be the best possible way of establishing causation, whether in biology, or medicine or social science. An experiment based on random controlled trials can be described simply. It is hypothesized that (H) X causes Y in a population of units P. An experiment testing …
Continue reading "Are randomized controlled trials the “gold standard” for establishing causation?"
Timothy Snyder helped Tony Judt to create a "spoken book" during Judt's final months of illness through a truly unique series of conversations about biography and history. The book is well worth reading. Snyder is the author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin and Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, and the spoken book he …
Continue reading "Tony Judt and Tim Snyder on the twentieth century"
There is an intriguing paragraph in Tony Judt and Tim Snyder's Thinking the Twentieth Century that made me curious. Judt says to Snyder: My own tenure case at Berkeley proceeded under the shadow cast by a long article I published in 1979 criticizing popular trends in social history, under the title “A Clown in Regal Purple.” Various …
One of the historians whose work I greatly appreciate is Tony Judt. I've posted about his seminal book about Europe after World War II (Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (link, link)) and his history of the French left in Marxism and the French Left: Studies on Labour and Politics in France, 1830-1981) (link). Some of his …
Continue reading "Tony Judt on memory and myth in the twentieth century"
An earlier post noted the increasing importance of experimentation in some areas of economics (link), and posed the question of whether there is a place for experimentation in sociology as well. Here I'd like to examine that question a bit further. Let's begin by asking the simple question: what is an experiment? An experiment is …
Yascha Mounk's recent The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It is one of several important efforts to understand the crisis that right-wing populism is creating for liberal democracies in many countries. (An abbreviated version of Mounk's analysis is published in his contribution to the Atlantic in March 2018 (link).) Mounk shares …
After several years of thinking about the nature of government as a network of organizations, I am happy to share the news that Palgrave Macmillan has published my short book, A New Social Ontology of Government: Consent, Coordination, and Authority (Foundations of Government and Public Administration). Thanks to Jos Raadschelders for proposing the book, and thanks …
Understanding Society 