Herbert Simon's The Sciences of the Artificial - 3rd Edition provided an alternative model for thinking about society. We can think of social institutions as partially designed and selected for their organizational properties; so they are different from proteins and planetary systems. Simon is also an important contributor to the study of complexity. So his new chapter …
The human sciences
Nomenclature isn't everything -- but it is important nonetheless. What we call the areas of research that examine history, action, and social life makes a difference to how we carry out those inquiries. The label "social science" itself is not a neutral one. And alternatives like "behavioral science" have even more baggage. The phrase …
World history
World history is more timely today than ever. “Globalization” is almost a cliché, from “The world is flat” to “the homogenization of cultures” to the “commodification of place.” Everyone recognizes the fact of globalization in the contemporary world. But we need to understand the many ways in which many parts of the world were deeply …
Epicurus’s philosophy
The philosophy of Epicurus wielded great influence, both in the ancient world and in the early modern world (as Steven Greenblatt shows in The Swerve; link). That philosophy was atomist, materialist, atheist, and oriented towards happiness as the highest human good. (The atheist part is complicated; he didn't deny the existence of the gods, but he denied …
Behavioral science
(1958-59 class of Fellows at Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences; link) Sometimes the rubric "behavioral science" is used to capture some of the research areas of fields like sociology, anthropology, political science, and social psychology. In some ways this usage is no more than an administrative convenience, a way of grouping disciplines into …
Greenblatt on civilization
Steven Greenblatt's recent book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, is an ambitious widening of Greenblatt's intellectual palette. The title of the book refers to one of the central ideas in the metaphysics of Epicurus: the idea that atoms sometimes deviate from their straight courses, permitting collisions. This fact, according to Epicurus, is the only possible …
New metaphors for the social
The social world is not like the natural world. Nature is composed of things, forces, and geometries that have strong determining regularities whose interactions can be formulated with mathematical precision. There are problems of indeterminacy in physics, of course; but fundamentally we can rely on the material properties of steel, the magnetic properties of the …
Why does social science matter?
What is the good of social science knowledge? In the natural sciences the answer is often pretty simple and pragmatic: natural science knowledge allows us to predict and control aspects of the natural environment. Physics underlays engineering. That's not always true, and it's not the only reason we value research and theory in physics, chemistry, …
Historians of sociology and classical social theory
Several readers of the recent post on Raymond Aron asked about other surveys of the history of sociology that are sometimes considered helpful. So I've pulled a couple of books off the shelves to mention as sources. I'm sure that readers will have additional suggestions. (Here is a post that attempts to map the field of sociology …
Continue reading "Historians of sociology and classical social theory"
Simulating social mechanisms
A key premise of complexity theory is that a population of units has "emergent" properties that result from the interactions of units with dynamic characteristics. Call these units "agents". The "agent" part of the description refers to the fact that the elements (persons) are self-directed units. Social ensembles are referred to as "complex adaptive systems" …
Understanding Society 