Dlittle30

LATEST ARTICLES ( 866 )

• Meanings and Mechanisms

  

  image: photographs of Martin Luther King, Jr. at the University of Michigan, 1962There are two large categories of factors that are fundamental to... Read more

  Posted on 07 February 2016 SOCIETY

• China's Developmental Resettlements

  

  The human costs of China's Three Gorges dam project are reasonably well known. Since construction began in 1994 between 1.3 million and two million people have... Read more

  Posted on 03 February 2016 SOCIETY

• Graphing the English-speaking University Curriculum

  

  Here is a fascinating and ambitious "big data" project that aims at probing and mapping the structure of the disaggregated university curriculum in the United... Read more

  Posted on 24 January 2016 SOCIETY

• Social Science History Association 2016 CFP

  

  SSHA CALL FOR PAPERSMacrohistorical Dynamics Network41st Annual Meeting of the Social Science History AssociationChicago IL 17-20 November 2016Submission... Read more

  Posted on 23 January 2016 SOCIETY

• What Parts of the Social World Admit of Explanation?

  

  image: John Dos Passos When Galileo, Newton, or Lavoisier confronted the natural world as “scientists,” they had in mind reasonably clear bodies of empirical... Read more

  Posted on 17 January 2016 SOCIETY

• Deliberation, Rationality, and Reasoning

  

  Recent posts have raised questions about formulating a rational plan of life. This way of putting the question highlights "rationality," which has the... Read more

  Posted on 16 January 2016 SOCIETY

• A Fresh Approach to Life Plans

  

  There isn't a clear philosophy of life-planning in the literature. So let's start from scratch. What do we need in order to make a plan for any temporally... Read more

  Posted on 06 January 2016 SOCIETY

• Rational Life Plans

  

  Aristotle, Kant, and Rawls agree: people ought to have rational plans of life to guide their everyday efforts and activities. But what is involved in being... Read more

  Posted on 04 January 2016 SOCIETY

• Is the Mind/body Problem Relevant to Social Science?

  

  Is solving the mind-body problem crucial to providing a satisfactory sociological theory?No, it isn't, in my opinion. But Alex Wendt thinks otherwise in... Read more

  Posted on 02 January 2016 SOCIETY

• Do All Roads Lead to Rome?

  

  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 discusse... Read more

  Posted on 29 December 2015 SOCIETY

• ANT-style Critique of ABM

  

  A short recent article in the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation by Venturini, Jensen, and Latour lays out a critique of the explanatory... Read more

  Posted on 28 December 2015 SOCIETY

• Quantum Cognition?

  

  Alexander Wendt proposes a radical idea in his Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology: that we should reconsider fundamentals... Read more

  Posted on 21 December 2015 SOCIETY

• Von Neumann on the Brain

  

  image: representation of a mammalian brain neural network After World War II John von Neumann became interested in the central nervous system as a computing... Read more

  Posted on 18 December 2015 SOCIETY

• John Von Neumann and Stochastic Simulations

  

  source: Monte Carlo method (Wikipedia)John von Neumann was one of the genuine mathematical geniuses of the twentieth century. A particularly interesting window... Read more

  Posted on 09 December 2015 SOCIETY

• Historical Vs. Sociological Explanation

  

  Think of the following matrix of explanatory possibilities of social and historical phenomena:Vertically the matrix divides between historical and sociological... Read more

  Posted on 04 December 2015 SOCIETY

• How to Do Cephalapod Philosophy

  

  How should researchers attempt to investigate non-human intelligence? The image above raises difficult questions. The octopus is manipulating (tenticlating?) th... Read more

  Posted on 29 November 2015 SOCIETY

• Are Emergence and Microfoundations Contraries?

  

  image: micro-structure of a nanomaterial (link)Are there strong logical relationships among the ideas of emergence, microfoundations, generative dependency,... Read more

  Posted on 22 November 2015 SOCIETY

• Do We Still Need Microfoundations?

  

  For quite a few years I have found the concept of microfoundations to be central for thinking about relationships across levels of social and individual... Read more

  Posted on 19 November 2015 SOCIETY

• SSHA 2015 Themes

  

  The 40th annual meeting of SSHA took place in Baltimore this weekend. The Social Science History Association is an especially rewarding academic meeting for... Read more

  Posted on 17 November 2015 SOCIETY

• Eight Years of Understanding Society

  

  This week marks the end of the eighth year of Understanding Society. This year passed the 1000 mark — the blog is now up to 1,029 posts, or well over one millio... Read more

  Posted on 11 November 2015 SOCIETY