Dlittle30

LATEST ARTICLES ( 893 )

• 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

• Modeling Organizational Recruitment

  

  One defect of the ABMs considered in the prior post about the emergence of civil conflict is that they do not incorporate the workings of organizations into... Read more

  Posted on 23 October 2015 SOCIETY

• ABM Approaches to Social Conflict

  

  Source: Pfautz and Salwen (link) An earlier post addressed the question of the dynamics through which a stable community consisting of multiple groups may... Read more

  Posted on 16 October 2015 SOCIETY

• Social Conflict and Group Mobilization

  

  source: Du Shiyu and Qi Jiayan, "Multi-agent Modeling and Simulation on Group Polarization Behavior in Web 2.0"An earlier post drew attention to the fact that... Read more

  Posted on 08 October 2015 SOCIETY

• What is a Morphogenic Society?

  

  diagram: Erik Olin Wright, The Value Controversy and Social Research (link)Margaret Archer's research collaboration on topics concerning the theory of... Read more

  Posted on 01 October 2015 SOCIETY

• Marx on Peasant Consciousness

  

  One of Marx's more important pieces of political writing is the The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1851) (pdf). Here is his analysis of the causes of... Read more

  Posted on 30 September 2015 SOCIETY

• Durkheim's Nightmare

  

  So here is Paris today ... thousands of anonymous strangers on Boulevard Saint-Germain at 5 pm, no sense of common bond or shared identity, a void of powerful... Read more

  Posted on 23 September 2015 SOCIETY

• Microfoundations and Mechanisms

  

  The topics of microfoundations and causal mechanisms have come up frequently in this work. The microfoundations thesis maintains that social attributions and... Read more

  Posted on 18 September 2015 SOCIETY

• A Survey of Agent-based Models

  

  Federico Bianchi and Flaminio Squazzoni have published a very useful survey of the development and uses of agent-based models in the social sciences over the... Read more

  Posted on 12 September 2015 SOCIETY

• Range of Reactions to Realism About the Social World

  

  My recent post on realism in the social realm generated quite a bit of commentary, which I'd like to address here.Brad Delong offered an incredulous response... Read more

  Posted on 04 September 2015 SOCIETY

• M I Finley on the Dynamics of the Roman Empire

  

  One of the books I found influential in graduate school in philosophy was M. I. Finley's The Ancient Economy, which appeared in 1973. Read more

  Posted on 01 September 2015 SOCIETY