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38Robert 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
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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
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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
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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
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Paul A. Roth, "Meaning and Method in the Social Sciences: A Case for Methodological Pluralism" (review)Theory and Society 19 (2): 252. 1990.
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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
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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
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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
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700The survey in nineteenth-century American Geology: The evolution of a form of patronage (review)Minerva 25 (3): 282-330. 1987.
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190Tacit 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.
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26Not So Radical HistoricismPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 45 (2): 246-257. 2015.Mark Bevir raises the question of how genealogy, understood as a technique-based radical historicism, and the notion of the contingency of ideas, ground “critique.” His problem is to avoid the relativism of radical historicism in a way that allows for “critique” without appealing to non-radical historicist absolutisms of the kind that ground the notion of false consciousness. He does so by appealing to the notion of motivated irrationality, which he claims avoids the problem of relativism and th…Read more
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25'... a powerful piece of work that deserves to be read widely. It ranges across central concerns in the fields of social theory, political theory, and science studies and engages with the ideas of key classical and contemporary thinkers' - Barry Smart, Professor of Sociology, University of Portsmouth.
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50Where explanation ends: Understanding as the place the spade turns in the social sciencesStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 44 (3): 532-538. 2013.Explanations implicitly end with something that makes sense, and begin with something that does not make sense. A statistical relationship, for example, a numerical fact, does not make sense; an explanation of this relationship adds something, such as causal information, which does make sense, and provides an endpoint for the sense-making process. Does social science differ from natural science in this respect? One difference is that in the natural sciences, models are what need ‘‘understanding.…Read more
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31Did Funding Matter to the Development of Research Methods in Sociology? (review)Minerva 36 (1): 69-79. 1998.Review of: A History of Sociological Research Methods in America, 1920-1960, by Jennifer Platt. One might expect a history of research methods in sociology during the 40 years this book examines to deal with such questions as the conceptual preconditions for the statistical techniques employed during the period, the changes in statistical practice, the failure of the effort to measure attitudes in a dramatically more precise way, the failure of the many hopes and expectations of methodologists, …Read more
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55Starting with tacit knowledge, ending with Durkheim? (review)Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 42 (3): 472-476. 2011.
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37Review essays : The end of functionalism: Parsons, Merton, and their HeirsPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 23 (2): 228-228. 1993.
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37Mindblind philosophy of historyJournal of the Philosophy of History 2 (2): 227-236. 2008.Historical explanation after Hempel came to be discussed in terms of a contrast between nomic explanations and rationalizations, and later between cause and narrative. This period can be taken as an historical parenthesis, in which the notion of cause narrowed and the notion of historical understanding as empathic dropped out. In the present philosophical landscape there are different models of cause available, especially in the causal modeling literature, and a revived appreciation, through the…Read more
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180Handbook of Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology (edited book)Elsevier. 2006.This volume concerns philosophical issues that arise from the practice of anthropology and sociology. The essays cover a wide range of issues, including traditional questions in the philosophy of social science as well as those specific to these disciplines. Authors attend to the historical development of the current debates and set the stage for future work.
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152The social theory of practices: tradition, tacit knowledge, and presuppositionsUniversity of Chicago Press. 1994.The concept of "practices"--whether of representation, of political or scientific traditions, or of organizational culture--is central to social theory. In this book, Stephen Turner presents the first analysis and critique of the idea of practice as it has developed in the various theoretical traditions of the social sciences and the humanities. Understood broadly as a tacit understanding "shared" by a group, the concept of a practice has a fatal difficulty, Turner argues: there is no plausible …Read more
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57Collingwood and Weber vs. Mink: History after the Cognitive TurnJournal of the Philosophy of History 5 (2): 230-260. 2011.Louis Mink wrote a classic study of R. G. Collingwood that led to his most important contribution to the philosophy of history, his account of narrative. Central to this account was the non-detachability thesis, that facts became historical facts through incorporation into narratives, and the thesis that narratives were not comparable to the facts or to one another. His book on Collingwood was critical of Collingwood's idea that there were facts in history that we get through self-knowledge but …Read more
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6Book Review : Theoretical Logic in Sociology, Volume 4: The Modern Reconstruction of Classical Thought: Talcott Parsons. By Jeffrey C. Alexander. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Pp. xxv + 530. $39.50 (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 15 (4): 513-522. 1985.
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76Searle's social realityHistory and Theory 38 (2). 1999.In The Construction of Social Reality, John Searle expends an argument left undeveloped in Speech Acts about the nature of the rules which underlie and constitute social life. It is argued in this review that one problem for this account was its apparent incompatibility with connectionism. They cannot be rules shared in the head, so to speak. He now understands our relation to these rules not as one of simple internalization but of skillful accustoming. But this makes appeal to rules unnecessary…Read more
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40Political Epistemology, Experts, and the Aggregation of KnowledgeSpontaneous Generations 1 (1): 36. 2007.Expert claims routinely “affect, combat, refute, and negate” someone or some faction or grouping of persons. When scientists proclaim the truth of Darwinism, they refute, negate, and whatnot the Christian view of the creation, and thus Christians. When research is done on racial differences, it affects, negates, and so on, those who are negatively characterized. This is why Phillip Kitcher argues that it should be banned. Some truths are too dangerous to ever inquire into, because, he reasons, e…Read more
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64Many approaches, but few arrivals: Merton and the columbia model of theory constructionPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 39 (2): 174-211. 2009.Robert Merton's essays on theories of the middle range and his essays on functional explanation and the structural approach are among the most influential in the history of sociology. But their import is a puzzle. He explicitly allied himself with some of the most extreme scientistic formalists and contributed to and endorsed the Columbia model of theory construction. But Merton never responded to criticisms by Ernest Nagel of his arguments or acknowledged the rivalry between Lazarsfeld and Herb…Read more
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21Sociological theory in transition (edited book)Allen & Unwin. 1986.Current sociological theories appear to have lost their general persuasiveness in part because, unlike the theories of the ‘classical era’, they fail to maintain an integrated stance toward society, and the practical role that sociology plays in society. The authors explore various facets of this failure and possibilities for reconstructing sociological theories as integrated wholes capable of conveying a moral and political immediacy. They discuss the evolution of several concepts (for example,…Read more
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59Emile Durkheim: sociologist and moralist (edited book)Routledge. 1993.This volume presents an overview of Durkheim's thought and is representative of the best of contemporary Durkheim scholarship.
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