Dlittle30

LATEST ARTICLES ( 899 )

• 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

• The Case for Realism in the Social Realm

  

  Image. Orderly chaos in flight path of ocean-foraging albatrossThe case for scientific realism in the case of physics, microbiology, and chemistry is a strong... Read more

  Posted on 29 August 2015 SOCIETY

• Guest Post by Doug Porpora on Social Structures

  

  Here is a response to my earlier post on social ontology and structure from Doug Porpora, professor of sociology, Drexel University. Doug is the author of... Read more

  Posted on 26 August 2015 SOCIETY

• A Flat Social Reality?

  

  I've been inclined to talk about the social world in terms of levels or layers, with a few provisos -- multiple layers, causation across layers, fuzzy boundarie... Read more

  Posted on 23 August 2015 SOCIETY

• Niiniluoto on Scientific Realism

  

  Debates over realism have been at the center of the philosophy of science for at least seventy-five years. The fundamental question is this: what exists in the... Read more

  Posted on 15 August 2015 SOCIETY

• Critical Realism and Social Heterogeneity

  

  Is the metaphysics of critical realism compatible with the idea of a highly heterogeneous social world?Here is what I mean by heterogeneity in this context. Read more

  Posted on 10 August 2015 SOCIETY

• Social Construction of Technical Knowledge

  

  After there was the sociology of knowledge (link), before there was a new sociology of knowledge (link), and more or less simultaneous with science and... Read more

  Posted on 03 August 2015 SOCIETY

• Microfoundations 2.0?

  

  Figure. An orderly ontological hierarchy (University of Leeds (link)Figure. Complex non-reductionist social outcome -- blightThe idea that hypotheses about... Read more

  Posted on 01 August 2015 SOCIETY

• Supervenience, Isomers, and Social Isomers

  

  A prior post focused on the question of whether chemistry supervenes upon physics, and I relied heavily on R. F. Hendry's treatment of the way that quantum... Read more

  Posted on 28 July 2015 SOCIETY

• Is Chemistry Supervenient Upon Physics?

  

  Many philosophers of science and physicists take it for granted that "physics" determines "chemistry". Or in terms of the theory of supervenience, it is commonl... Read more

  Posted on 26 July 2015 SOCIETY

• Microfoundations for Rules and Ascriptions

  

  One of the more convincing arguments for the existence of social facts that lie above the level of individual actors is the social reality of rules and... Read more

  Posted on 23 July 2015 SOCIETY

• Supervenience and the Social: Epstein's Critique

  

  Does the social world supervene upon facts about individuals and the physical environment of action? Brian Epstein argues not in several places, most notably... Read more

  Posted on 15 July 2015 SOCIETY

• Goffman on Close Encounters

  image: GIF from D. Witt (link)George Herbert Mead's approach to social psychology is an important contribution to the new pragmatism in sociology (link). Read more

  Posted on 05 July 2015 SOCIETY

• Deliberative Democracy and the Age of Social Media

  

  Several earlier posts have focused on the theory of deliberative democracy (link, link, link). The notion is that political decision-making can be improved by... Read more

  Posted on 02 July 2015 SOCIETY

• Quantum Mental Processes?

  One of the pleasant aspects of a long career in philosophy is the occasional experience of a genuinely novel approach to familiar problems. Sometimes one's... Read more

  Posted on 30 June 2015 SOCIETY