Daniel Little
A common kind of causal narrative employed by historians is to identify a set of key actors, key circumstances, and key resources; and then to treat a period of time as a flow of actions by the actors in response to each other and changing circumstances. We might describe this as "explanation of an outcome …
Continue reading "Causal narratives about historical actors"
George Steinmetz offers a comparative sociology of colonialism in The Devil's Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa. More specifically, he wants to explain differences in the implementation of "native policy" within German colonial regimes around the turn of the twentieth century. He finds that there are significant differences across three …
To explain a social outcome or regularity, we need to provide an account of why and how it came about; and this means providing a causal analysis in terms of which the explanandum appears as a result. Having a causal theory of a realm requires having an ontology: what kinds of things exist in this …
There are quite a few interesting comments on my earlier post on The Spirit Level on Economist's View. I can't respond in detail to all of them, but here are a few additional thoughts. A few commentators seem to think I'm unsympathetic to the book, which isn't accurate. So let me be more direct in my assessment of The …
We can use computational modeling techniques to aggregate individual behavior into collective patterns. A simple version of this is Thomas Schelling's segregation model (Micromotives and Macrobehavior). Most commonly these tools have been used to model the results of rational choices by the actors involved, often using the tools of game theory. But the approach is …
Continue reading "Aggregation dynamics of conditional psychological dispositions"
Social contention theorists Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly created a great deal of interest in the "mechanisms" approach to social explanation with the publication of their Dynamics of Contention in 2001. The book advocated for several important new angles of approach to the problem of analyzing and explaining social contention: to disaggregate the object of …
Let's say we've absorbed the anti-positivism argued many times here -- sociology should not be modeled on the natural sciences, we shouldn't expect social phenomena to have the homogeneity and consistency characteristic of natural phenomena, and we shouldn't expect to find social laws. What remains for the intellectual task of post-positivist sociology? What do we …
What is involved in taking a realist approach to social science knowledge? Most generally, realism involves the view that at least some of the assertions of a field of knowledge make true statements about the properties of unobservable things, processes, and states in the domain of study. Several important philosophers of science have taken up this …
Continue reading "Scientific realism for the social sciences"
Over 700 historians, sociologists, demographers, and political scientists enjoyed a splendid program of panels at the Social Science History Association in Long Beach this week (link). There were panels on recent historical demography, comparative historical analysis, and social mobilization research, as well as a pair of great panels on the work of Charles Tilly. There …
I offer a social ontology that I refer to as methodological localism (ML). This theory of social entities affirms that there are large social structures and facts that influence social outcomes. But it insists that these structures are only possible insofar as they are embodied in the actions and states of socially constructed individuals. The …
Understanding Society 