Stephen Turner

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 produced by the structure.

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 supportable by any explanatory necessity, and that the differences in outcomes, though real, are not instances of relativism. /// El relativismo de prácticas es la idea de que las prácticas sirven de fundamento para cuerpos de actividad y pensamiento, y que difieren unas de otras de maneras que llevan a aquellos que constituyen el mundo en esos términos a conclusiones inconmensurables o contradictorias. Es cierto que las prácticas no son criticables de ninguna manera simple porque en general son tácitas e inaccesibles. Pero para que sean relativistas hace falta una tesis adicional: que las prácticas son normativas o conceptuales. Aquí se arguye que esto no puede sustentarse en ninguna necesidad explicativa, y que las diferencias en resultados, si bien son reales, no son casos de relativismo.

The 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 older problematics, such as the micro–macro relation problem in sociology, the traditional argument that sentences such as “the crowd stormed the Bastille” have explanatory import apart from the import of sentences about the individual, and claims about reducibility of various kinds.This volume collects original papers by many of the main commentators on this set of topics and is an indispensable starting point for future discussion. No one should venture into this area without understanding the v ..

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 well-known sociologists, all of them "children of the ’60s." It illuminates the human experience of living through that decade as apprentice scholars and activists, encountering the issues of class, race, the Establishment, the decline of traditional religion, feminism, war, and the sexual revolution. In each case the interlinked crises of young adulthood, rapid change, and nascent professional careers shaped this generation’s private and public selves. This is an intensely personal collective portrait of a generation in a time of struggle.

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 Index Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

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 thought from Experience and Its Modes through to On Human Conduct itself, where Oakeshott changes his terminology. But why does Oakeshott change? One reason might be the critique of Oakeshott by Peter Winch, as Oakeshott appears to have reformulated his views in response to it in On Human Conduct, in the course of constructing an alternative to ‘conceptual analysis’ as practiced in contemporary Oxbridge.

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-Kantian kind have difficulties shared by Collins’s argument for Collective Tacit Knowledge. The alternative, a fully social account of our capacities of understanding and interpretation, avoids these difficulties and allows for a model of tacit knowledge that serves the supposed explanatory needs that the “collective” part of Collins’s account purports to meet

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 philosophy of mind and in light of such discoveries as mirror neurons, of empathy. The newer causal modeling literature foregrounds the problem of confounding or overdetermination, but solves it in ways inimical to historical explanation. Empathy, however, represents an alternative solution, available to the historian, in which causal relevance can be assessed and established in terms of its role in the reenacted experience of the historical subject. This suggests the idea that the art of history is using historical evidence to show what people might have thought and felt under past circumstances, in ways that engage our capacities to mind-read - capacities established by cognitive science.

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 mechanism by which a "practice" is transmitted or reproduced. The historical uses of the concept, from Durkheim to Kripke's version of Wittgenstein, provide examples of the contortions that thinkers have been forced into by this problem, and show the ultimate implausibility of the idea. Turner's conclusion sketches a picture of what happens when we do without the notion of a shared practice, and how this bears on social theory and philosophy. It explains why social theory cannot get beyond the stage of constructing fuzzy analogies, and why the standard constructions of the contemporary philosophical problem of relativism depend upon this defective notion. This first book-length critique of practice theory is sure to stir discussion and controversy in a wide range of fields, from philosophy and science studies to sociology, anthropology, literary studies, and political and legal theory.

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 which are nevertheless objective, his account of re-enactment, and his notion of absolute presuppositions. It is illuminating to compare Collingwood to Weber with respect to these puzzling arguments, for the same issues arise there in different form. Recent work in social neuroscience on mirroring allows a different approach to these puzzles: mirror system “knowledge“ of others and simulation fit, respectively, with Weber's idea of direct observational understanding and Collingwood's re-enactment account. This account allows for the detaching of historical facts about thoughts and action from narrative

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 and makes noncollective solutions appealing to overt beliefs rather than tacit rules more plausible.

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, even by inquiring we legitimate the negation that racial distinctions already carry. Expert claims also favour or disfavour policies or decisions which have factions or persons supporting them.

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 Herbert Simon, rarely cited the philosophical and methodological literature, and responded to critics with ambiguous concessions, leaving the Mertonian legacy profoundly ambiguous. Key Words: Robert Merton • Paul Lazarsfeld • theory construction • middle range theory • causal modeling • Émile Durkheim.

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, the social, structure, and self) and address the significant disputes (for example, structuralism versus humanism, and individual versus society) that have dominated twentieth-century sociological thought. Their ideas and analyses are directed towards an audience of students and theorists who are coming to terms with the project of sociological theory, and its relationship with moral discourses and political practice. The authors of these essays are sociological theorists from the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. They are all established, but not ‘establishment’ authors. The book contains no orthodoxies, and no answers. However, the essays do contribute to identifying the range of issues that will constitute the agenda for the next generation of sociological theorists.

The writing of history typically involves opinions that cannot be established by historical evidence. This 'involvement' takes two main forms: first, the intimation of evaluative opinions is often the point of historical narratives; and second, as Weber maintained, opinion plays a constitutive role-the identification of historical objects, of explanatory problems, and perhaps even the selection of solutions to these problems is governed by opinions or commitments that cannot be proven historically. The comments of both Bulmer and Camic, for example, presume the validity of opinions about what was and was not important in the history of American sociology. I reject these opinions. In the book, the rejection was intimated. Perhaps the most useful thing I can do in this reply is to identify and sharpen some of the differences in unprovable opinions between myself and the critics though I must say that they were charitable and mild critics indeed-and make explicit some of the things that I wished to intimate in the historical discussion but could not prove. There are two reasons for doing this: Most of the questions raised by each of the commentators can be more easily addressed if these hidden themes and differences of opinion are made more explicit. A more important reason is this: some of these conflicts might be turned into answerable historical problems.

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 mental frame or set of rules. If cognitive science, in its connectionist forms, allows us to give a naturalistic though nonreductive sense to his words, Oakeshott, like other philosophers who have employed the concept of tradition, expanded his discussion into a broader reconsideration of the nature of theorizing, a metaphilosophy. And this extension can be understood in relation to such recent thinkers as McDowell and, in particular, to the problem of the acquisition of the normative. Key Words: idealism • Oakeshott • connectionism • normativity.

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 strategy involves difficulties as well. To separate "analytically" the elements or aspects of rationality and then to "discover" empirical causal relations between them seems akin to spinning gold from straw.

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 a web of belief and practical activity that is in constant change. We can perhaps salvage some point to appeals to fixed frameworks if we treat them as “as if “ constructions designed as crutches to enable us to improve on literal readings of the texts by making more sense of the inferential connections and practical significance of their content at the time

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 "error," and thus as potentially eliminable, but this claim is highly questionable, on grounds evident from Pearson's philosophy of science. The implications of large ineliminable error for the project of theory construction, particularly the "formal theory" of Blau and the California Positivists, is discussed. The ease of producing statistical results is an achievement, but one that leads away from theory rather than toward it, and, because the fact of underdetermination prevents these results from establishing clear cognitive superiority over the results of other "approaches," theoretical diversity is, in a sense, a consequence of the properties of the dominant statistical tradition in sociology