Dlittle30
I am a philosopher of social science with a strong interest in China and Southeast Asia. Paying attention to the logical and conceptual issues raised by the social sciences is key to better understanding the modern world. I think philosophers need to interact seriously and extensively with working social scientists and historians if they are going to be able to make a useful contribution.
MY BLOGS
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Understanding Society
http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/
Innovative thinking about social agency and structure in a global world
LATEST ARTICLES ( 863 )
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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 -
Social Relations Across Class Lines
People relate to each other on the basis of a set of moral and cognitive frameworks -- ideas about the social world and how others are expected to behave --... Read more
Posted on 06 November 2015 SOCIETY -
Modifying an Epidemiological Model for Party Recruitment
Here I'll follow up on the idea of using an epidemiological model to capture the effects of political mobilization through organization. One of the sample model... Read more
Posted on 02 November 2015 SOCIETY -
Microfoundations and Causal Powers
Image: Three Mile Island control roomThere isn't a lot of cross-over between the microfoundations literature (Peter Hedstrom, Dissecting the Social: On the... Read more
Posted on 30 October 2015 SOCIETY