-
27The Belief-Desire Model of Action Explanation Reconsidered: Thoughts on BittnerPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 48 (3): 290-308. 2018.The belief-desire model of action explanation is deeply ingrained in multiple disciplines. There is reason to think that it is a cultural artifact. But is there an alternative? In this discussion, I will consider the radical critique of this action explanation model by Rüdiger Bittner, which argues that the model appeals to dubious mental entities, and argues for a model of reasons as responses to states or events. Instead, for Bittner, agents are reason-selectors—selecting the states or events …Read more
-
41Robert Merton and Dorothy Emmet: Deflated Functionalism and StructuralismPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 44 (6): 817-836. 2014.Dorothy Emmet, in two books, one of which was based on extensive personal contact with Robert Merton and Columbia sociology, provides the closest thing we have to an authorized philosophical defense of Merton. It features a deflationary account of functionalism which dispenses with the idea of general teleological ends. What it replaces it with is an account of “structures” that have various consequences and that are maintained because, on Emmet’s account, of the mutual reinforcement of motives …Read more
-
31Practice RelativismCritica 39 (115): 5-29. 2007.Practice relativism is the idea that practices are foundational for bodies of activity and thought, and differ from one another in ways that lead those who constitute the world in terms of them to incommensurable or conflicting conclusions. It is true that practices are not criticizable in any simple way because they are largely tacit and inaccessible. But to make them relativistic one needs an added claim: that practices are "normative", or conceptual in character. It is argued that this is not…Read more
-
27The problem of holism in social science has, as Zahle and Collin, the editors of this volume note, a long history. It has revived, however, in a peculiar way, inspired by such things as the literature on corporate responsibility in ethics, the idea of supervenience, “Critical Realism” in sociology, ideas about emergence, the use of game-theoretic models to account for collective outcomes, and various notions of collective actors with collective intentions. These new inspirations interact with ol…Read more
-
7The Disobedient Generation: Social Theorists in the SixtiesHuman Studies 30 (4): 467-470. 2005.The late 1960s are remembered today as the last time wholesale social upheaval shook Europe and the United States. College students during that tumultuous period—epitomized by the events of May 1968—were as permanently marked in their worldviews as their parents had been by the Depression and World War II. Sociology was at the center of these events, and it changed decisively because of them. The Disobedient Generation collects newly written autobiographies by an international cross-section of w…Read more
-
Paul A. Roth, "Meaning and Method in the Social Sciences: A Case for Methodological Pluralism" (review)Theory and Society 19 (2): 252. 1990.
-
16Brains/Practices/Relativism: Social Theory After Cognitive ScienceUniversity of Chicago Press. 2002.AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Social Theory After Cognitive Science1. Throwing Out the Tacit Rule Book: Learning and Practices2. Searle's Social Reality3. Imitation or the Internalization of Norms: Is Twentieth-Century Social Theory Based on the Wrong Choice?4. Relativism as Explanation5. The Limits of Social Constructionism6. Making Normative Soup Out of Nonnormative Bones7. Teaching Subtlety of Thought: The Lessons of "Contextualism"8. Practice in Real Time9. The Significance of ShilsReferences…Read more
-
15Book Review: The English Heidegger (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 35 (3): 353-368. 2005.Terry Nardin’s book on Oakeshott is an attempt to compare him to other 20th-century philosophers and to track the development of his philosophical thought. The project of comparison is made relevant by the fact that Oakeshott’s philosophy, like that of Heidegger and others, was the product of the dissolution of neo-Kantianism. Nardin stresses the idea of “modal confusion,” meaning responding to a question of one kind with an answer appropriate to another kind of inquiry, as a key to Oakeshott’s …Read more
-
23Taking the Collective Out of Tacit KnowledgePhilosophia Scientiae 17 (3): 75-92. 2013.The concepts of “collective” and “social” are routinely confused, with claims about collective facts and their necessity justified by evidence that involves only social or interactional facts. This is the case with Harry Colllins’ argument for tacit knowledge as well. But the error is deeply rooted in the history of philosophy, in the notion of shared presuppositions popularized by neo-Kantianism, which confused logical claims of necessity with factual claims about groups. Claims of this neo-Kan…Read more
-
708The survey in nineteenth-century American Geology: The evolution of a form of patronage (review)Minerva 25 (3): 282-330. 1987.
-
208Tacit knowledg and the problem of computer modelling cognitive processes in scienceIn Steve Fuller (ed.), The Cognitive turn: sociological and psychological perspectives on science, Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1989.In what follows I propose to bring out certain methodological properties of projects of modelling the tacit realm that bear on the kinds of modelling done in connection with scientific cognition by computer as well as by ethnomethodological sociologists, both of whom must make some claims about the tacit in the course of their efforts to model cognition. The same issues, I will suggest, bear on the project of a cognitive psychology of science as well.
-
64Tradition and cognitive science: Oakeshott’s undoing of the Kantian mindPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 33 (1): 53-76. 2003.In this discussion, the author asks the question if Oakeshott’s famous depiction of a practice might be understood in relation to contemporary cognitive science, in particular connectionism (the contemporary cognitive science approach concerned with the problem of skills and skilled knowing) and in terms of the now conventional view of "normativity" in Anglo-American philosophy. The author suggests that Oakeshott meant to contrast practices to an alternative "Kantian" model of a shared tacit men…Read more
-
31Rationality todaySociological Theory 9 (2): 191-194. 1991.We come to the finding of the sociology of scientific knowledge that all rationality is local, dependent on local customs and practices, shaped by the contingencies of history. Either this claim or that of the rational choice program is wrong. One way out of this conflict would be to accept the irreconcilability of the various concepts of rationality, to reject Boudon's and Bourricaud's conclusion that these usages have a common core, and to make rationality an "empirical problem." Yet this stra…Read more
-
65Meaning without TheoryJournal of the Philosophy of History 5 (3): 352-369. 2011.There is a core conflict between conventional ideas about “meaning“ and the phenomenon of meaning and meaning change in history. Conventional accounts are either atemporal or appeal to something fixed that bestows meaning, such as a rule or a convention. This produces familiar problems over change. Notions of rule and convention are metaphors for something tacit. They are unhelpful in accounting for change: there are no rule-givers or convenings in history. Meanings are in flux, and are part of …Read more
-
16II.5 Interpretive Charity, Durkheim, and the ‘Strong Programme’ in the Sociology of SciencePhilosophy of the Social Sciences 11 (2): 231-243. 1981.
-
36Underdetermination and the promise of statistical sociologySociological Theory 5 (2): 172-184. 1987.The lack of "progress" in theory is often contrasted to progress in statistical methodology. The relation between the two bodies of thinking is itself problematic, however, for the particular advances in method that have occurred in quantitative sociology reflect a trade-off in which the results are characterized by the radical underdetermination of models by data and a high level of slack between measures and theoretical concepts. Both of these problems are usually understood as matters of "err…Read more
-
668Cause, the Persistence of Teleology, and the Origins of the Philosophy of Social ScienceIn Stephen P. Turner and Paul Roth (ed.), Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, . pp. 21-42. 2003.The subject of this chapter is the complex and confusing course of the discussion of cause and teleology before and during the period of Mill and Comte, and its aftermath up to the early years of the twentieth century in the thinking of several of the major founding figures of disciplinary social science. The discussion focused on the problem of the sufficiency of causal explanations, and particularly the question of whether some particular fact could be explained without appeal to purpose. In r…Read more
-
26Book Reviews : Theoretical Logic in Sociology, Volume 1: Positivism, Presuppositions, and Current Controversies. BY JEFFREY C. ALEXANDER. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Pp. 234. $25.00 cloth (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 15 (1): 77-82. 1985.
-
42Social Theory and Sociology: The Classics and BeyondWiley-Blackwell. 1996.This Timely volume represents an attempt by leading practitioners in the field to think reflexively about the present state of social theory and its historical analogues, and to consider new directions opposed to the "classical" social theorists, as well as new uses of the classics. Social Theory and Sociology begins to address a problem that is salient for students as well as academics, namely, why and how does the legacy of social theory matter? What is the value of what we are learning? No at…Read more
-
Public Sociology and Democratic Theory Stephen P. TurnerIn Jeroen Van Bouwel (ed.), The Social Sciences and Democracy, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 165. 2009.
-
143 MacIntyre in the Province of the Philosophy of the Social SciencesIn Mark C. Murphy (ed.), Alasdair Macintyre, Cambridge University Press. pp. 70. 2003.Many of the key issues that the later papers address are contained in his 1962 paper “A mistake about causality in social science,” which I will show, was an important seed bed for his later thought. The concept of practices MacIntyre developed was itself a social theory: the “philosophical” conclusions are dependent on its validity as an account of practices as a social phenomenon. There is a question of philosophical or social theoretical method that bears on the status of this theory, one of…Read more
-
140Explaining normativityPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 37 (1): 57-73. 2007.In this reply, I raise some questions about the account of "normativity" given by Joseph Rouse. I discuss the historical form of disputes over normativity in such thinkers as Kelsen and show that the standard issue with these accounts is over the question of whether there is anything added to the normal stream of explanation by the problem of normativity. I suggest that Rouses attempt to avoid the issues that arise with substantive explanatory theories of practices of the kind criticized in The…Read more
-
27The Disappearance of Tradition in WeberMidwest Studies in Philosophy 15 (1): 400-424. 1990.In this essay we will consider another basic topic: the problem of the nature of the distinctions between Sitte, Brauch, Wert, Mode, and Recht, on which Weber's discussion relies. These discussions typically involved the untranslatable concept of Sitte, which marks a contrast between practices or customs with normative force and “mere practice.” There is a close parallel to this distinction in American social thought in W. G. Sumner's latinate distinction between the mores and folkways of a soci…Read more
-
13The Cambridge Companion to Weber (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2000.Max Weber is indubitably one of the very greatest figures in the history of the social sciences, the source of seminal concepts like 'the Protestant Ethic', 'charisma' and the idea of historical processes of 'rationalization'. But, like his great forebears Adam Smith and Karl Marx, Weber's work always resists easy categorisation. Prominent as a founding father of sociology, Weber has been a major influence in the study of ancient history, religion, economics, law and, more recently, cultural stu…Read more
-
4Book Reviews : Social Knowledge: An Essay on the Nature and Limits of Social Science. By Paul Mattick, Jr. London: Hutchinson, 1986. Pp. x + 137. £12.95 (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 18 (4): 582-586. 1988.
-
46Normative all the way downStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 36 (2): 419-429. 2005.
Tampa, Florida, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Other Academic Areas |
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |