-
11Durkheim among the StatisticiansJournal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 32 (4): 354-378. 1996.
-
10Taking the Collective Out of Tacit KnowledgePhilosophia Scientiae 17 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
-
9Weber, the Germans, and Anglo-Saxon ConventionIn R. M. Glassman (ed.), Max Weber's Political Sociology: A Pessimistic Vision of a Rationalized World, Greenwood Press. pp. 39-54. 1984.
-
9Cause, Teleology, and MethodIn T. M. Porter & D. Ross (eds.), The Cambridge History of Science, Cambridge University Press. pp. 57-70. 2003.The model of social science established in methodological writings of the 1830s and 1840s formed an ideal that has endured to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Subsequent authors have been obliged to excuse the social sciences for their failure to achieve this ideal model of science, to reinterpret the successes of social science in terms of it, or to construct alternative conceptions of social science in contrast to it. The ideal was worked out in two closely related texts, Auguste Com…Read more
-
9Thinking Epistemically about Experts and Publics: A Response to SelingerSocial Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 3 (9): 36-43. 2014.Evan Selinger’s review nicely captures the main concerns of my collection of essays, The Politics of Expertise. He raises an important question that is touched on in several essays but not fully developed: the problem of getting expert knowledge possessed by academics into something like public discussion or the public domain. This is of course only a part of the problem of expertise and the larger problem of knowledge in society. But it can be approached in more detail than was done in the book…Read more
-
9Tacit KnowledgeIn Byron Kaldis (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences, Sage Publications Ltd.. 2013.
-
9Democracy, Liberalism, and Discretion: The Political Puzzle of the Administrative StateIn D. Hardwick & L. Marsh (eds.), Reclaiming Liberalism. Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism, . 2020.Conventional accounts of liberal democracy tend to obscure a basic fact: the phenomenon of administration. The American reception of the administrative state was self-consciously imitative of Continental models of state bureaucracy, as a remedy for the ills of democratic politics, but construed as a means of saving democracy from itself, and from lawyers and legalism, in the name of efficiency. The means was discretionary power, unaccountable to the courts and to voters. Reconciling this to demo…Read more
-
9The Concept of Face ValidityQuality and Quantity 13 (1): 85-90. 1979.The concept of “face validity”, used in the sense of the contrast between “face validity” and “construct validity”, is conventionally understood in a way which is wrong and misleading. The wrong view had relatively limited consequences for research practice per se. However, it is a serious obstacle in theoretical discussions of certain “philosophical” or “foundational” issues. In this brief note I would like to point out the logical defect in the conventional position and correct it by making th…Read more
-
8The Human Face of KnowledgeTradition and Discovery 47 (3): 19-20. 2021.This is a brief response to comments by Struan Jacobs and Peter Blum on The Calling of Social Thought, Rediscovering the Work of Edward Shils, a recent collection of essays edited by Christopher Adair-Toteff and Stephen Turner. It identifies a distinctive contribution of Shils to the larger problem of the tacit.
-
8Decisionism and Politics: Weber as Constitutional TheoristIn Sam Whimster & Dr Scott Lash (eds.), Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity, Routledge. 2014.The N ational Assembly held in the Frankfurt Paulskirche in 1848, which opened w ith high hopes for the unification o f Germ any on parliam entary constitutional principles, was left to die a year later, in the telling phrase o f D onoso Cortes, ‘like a street w om an in the gu tter’. In the period o f reaction that followed, during w hich the Paulskirche convention came to be described as the ‘parliam ent o f pro fessors’, one o f its m em bers, Georg G ottfried Gervinus, was accused, in a tri…Read more
-
8Cause, Concepts, Measures and the Underdetermination of Theory by DataInternational Review of Sociology 1 (3): 249-271. 1987.
-
8Objective Possibility and Adequate Causation in Weber's Methodological WritingsThe Sociological Review 29 (1): 5-28. 1981.
-
8Social Theory as a Cognitive NeuroscienceEuropean Journal of Social Theory 10 (3): 357-374. 2007.In the nineteenth century, there was substantial and sophisticated interest in neuroscience on the part of social theorists, including Comte and Spencer, and later Simon Patten and Charles Ellwood. This body of thinking faced a dead end: it could do little more than identify highly general mechanisms, and could not provide accounts of such questions as `why was there no proletarian revolution?' Psychologically dubious explanations, relying on neo-Kantian views of the mind, replaced them. With th…Read more
-
8Making Sense of Christopher DawsonIn P. Panayotova (ed.), The History of Sociology in Britain, . 2019.Christopher Dawson identified with sociology, wrote extensively for the original Sociological Review, was a stalwart of the Sociological Society in the interwar years, achieved international recognition as a sociologist, engaged with Karl Mannheim and the Moot, and in the postwar period defended meta-history and the sociologically oriented historical work of people like Marc Bloch. He ultimately became regarded as the greatest Catholic historian of the twentieth century, and became a Harvard Pro…Read more
-
8Polanyian in Spirit: A Reply to GulickTradition and Discovery 25 (1): 12-20. 1998.Walter Gulick criticizes The Social Theory of Practices for its non-Polanyian views of the problem of the objective character of tacit knowledge, its insistence that there should be plausible causal mechanisms that correspond to claims about tacit knowledge and its “social” transmission, and its denial of the social, telic character of practices. In this reply it is asserted that the demand for causally plausible mechanisms is not scientistic or for that matter non-Polanyian, that the book has a…Read more
-
8The Naturalistic Moment in NormativismIn Johannes Bakker (ed.), Rural Sociologists at Work: Candid Accounts of Theory, Method, and Practice, Routledge. 2015.This chapter focuses on a question about one role: the explanatory role of normativism or normativity in relation to ordinary 'scientific', meaning social scientific, explanations of actions and beliefs, especially the empirical, observable, or empirically relevant aspects of human conduct. Call this the epistemic form of the naturalistic moment problem. It call this a 'naturalistic moment', a place where normativism makes factual assertions about real processes in the natural world. This pseudo…Read more
-
8Morgenthau as a Weberian MethodologistEuropean Journal of International Relations 15 (3): 477-504. 2009.Hans Morgenthau was a founder of the modern discipline of International Relations, and his Politics among Nations was for decades the dominant textbook in the field. The character of his Realism has frequently been discussed in debates on methodology and the nature of theory in International Relations. Almost all of this discussion has mischaracterized his views. The clues given in his writings, as well as his biography, point directly to Max Weber’s methodological writings. Morgenthau, it is ar…Read more
-
8Schmitt, CarlIn Bryan S. Turner (ed.), The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory, 5 Volume Set, Wiley-blackwell. 2017.Carl Schmitt was a lawyer and philosopher of law whose writings on politics and social theory led to his being known as the Hobbes of the twentieth century. His criticisms of liberalism and naive humanitarianism and secularism were startlingly original and extreme, and attracted intellectuals on the Left as well as on the Right. His basic ideas about society revolved around the problem of the location and sources of the power of the state, which he styled as a mortal god. His most influential id…Read more
-
8Weber's Influence in Weimar GermanyJournal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 18 (2): 147-156. 1982.The thesis that Weber was without influence in Weimar Germany is examined. It is shown that in contemporary published assessments and in private statements in interviews contemporary sociologists regarded him as important. The many dissertations on Weber and the enormous secondary literature are noted. This literature, which was contributed by some of the best minds of the day, included both the philosophical and sociological aspects of Weber's work. It is concluded that the thesis that Weber wa…Read more
-
8Merton's `Norms' in Political and Intellectual ContextJournal of Classical Sociology 7 (2): 161-178. 2007.Merton's two papers on the norms of science were written in a period of intense political activity in science, and responded to this context, using conceptual tools from classical sociology and Harvard thinking of the time. The basic reasoning was Weberian: science and politics each had a different ethos. One target was the Left view of science as a model for society. Another was the view of the American Left that complex societies required regulation, but that science should be free of control.…Read more
-
8Cognitive ScienceIn Lee C. McIntyre & Alexander Rosenberg (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Social Science, Routledge. 2016.The relationship between the social sciences and the cognitive sciences is underdeveloped and complicated, for reasons we will explain in this chapter, and the philosophical discussion of this relationship has the same properties. Many reasons for the lack of development relate to a traditional philosophical issue: explanation. The explanatory structure of cognitive science reasoning and argumentation is unusual and difcult to t into the traditional model of scientic explanation, though they do …Read more
-
7Shils, EdwardIn J. D. Wright (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition), Elsevier. pp. 884-888. 2015.Edward Shils was a prominent American sociologist and social theorist who spent much of his career in Britain. He was the translator of Karl Mannheim and collaborator with Talcott Parsons. His own social theory concentrated on the relation of primary groups and intellectuals to the center of society, which he conceived of in terms of its charismatic character. Unlike Parsons, he was especially concerned with the conflicts between the social attachments of people, and especially with those involv…Read more
Tampa, Florida, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Other Academic Areas |
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |