Dlittle30

LATEST ARTICLES ( 899 )

• 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

• 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