Daniel Little
Neil Gross has a remarkably good ear for philosophy. And this extends especially to his occasional treatments of the influences that helped shape the discipline of philosophy in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. His sociological biography of Richard Rorty is a tour de force (Richard Rorty: The Making of …
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Sociology is a discipline with a short history and a very dense and complex tree of topics and methods. So writing its history — even limited to the past century and a half — is extremely challenging. And the idea that the discipline has worked itself out as the methodical development of ideas advanced by …
For anyone interested in getting a deep exposure to current thinking about causation within the critical realist tradition, Ruth Groff's 2008 collection Revitalizing Causality: Realism about Causality in Philosophy and Social Science is a very good place to start. It begins with classic essays by Roy Wood Sellars from 1929 and 1943 -- long before the …
Frédéric Vandenberghe is an important contributor to the philosophy of critical realism. His interesting book A Philosophical History of German Sociology appeared in 2008, which started life as his PhD thesis in 1994. Like an earlier tradition of historians of sociology (e.g. Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought: Montesquieu, Comte, Marx, de Tocqueville, Sociologists …
Questions about the empirical validation of hypotheses about social causation have been of interest in the past several weeks here. Relevant to that question is Dawn Langan Teele's recent volume, Field Experiments and Their Critics: Essays on the Uses and Abuses of Experimentation in the Social Sciences. The essays in the book make for interesting …
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How should a realist think about confirmation of hypotheses and theories about real social structures and properties? Here is what the Ur-realist Roy Bhaskar has to say about the object of scientific knowledge in his approach in A Realist Theory of Science: [CR] regards the objects of knowledge as the structures and mechanisms that generate …
The social mechanisms approach to the social sciences aligns well with two key intellectual practices, experiments and policies. In an experiment we are interesting in testing whether a given factor has the effect it is thought to have. In a policy design we are interested in affecting an outcome of interest by manipulating some of …
Gabriel Abend has recently published The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics, a remarkable book on what seems initially to be a small subject -- a history of the academic field of business ethics. I say "seems", because in Abend's hands this topic turns out to be a superb subject for …
What can ordinary experience tell us about how skilled practitioners can be brought to a high level of competence and performance? Let's say we are interested in teaching a child to play the violin at an advanced level, beginning at the novice level. The outcome we want to influence is the child's ability to play …
image: Henri Bonaventure Monnier, Crowded Restaurant 1860 image: James Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory, p. 245 James Coleman offers a skeptical position on the question of the reality of social structures in his landmark book, Foundations of Social Theory (1990). Coleman advocates for a view of research and theory in sociology that emphasizes the actions …
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Understanding Society 