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7Religious Pluralism, Toleration, and Liberal Democracy: Past, Present, and FutureIn J. Neusner (ed.), Religion and the Political Order: Politics in Classical and Contemporary Christianity, Islam and Judaism, University of South Florida. pp. 275-299. 2000.
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14Dissolution of the Classical ProjectIn Mark L. Wardell & Stephen P. Turner (eds.), Sociological theory in transition, Allen & Unwin. pp. 161-165. 1986.
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4Making Normative Soup with Non-Normative BonesIn Alan Sica (ed.), What is social theory?: the philosophical debates, Blackwell. pp. 118-144. 1998.
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12Human Sciences, History ofIn James Wright (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition), Elsevier. pp. 380-385. 2001.The term Human Sciences is primarily a French usage, but it refers back to a much deeper tradition in the literature claiming that works of the spirit and human experience cannot be reduced to the realm of causal science, and require different methods. Following Kant, much of this discussion has focused on the problem of the conceptual formation of human experience. Methodologically, discussion has shifted back and forth between an emphasis on concepts, on experience, and external facts. Foucaul…Read more
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4The Tragedy of the Liberal Theory of ScienceIn Péter Hartl (ed.), Science, Faith, Society: New Essays on the Philosophy of Michael Polanyi, Springer Verlag. pp. 277-297. 2024.The Liberal Theory of Science, best articulated by Michael Polanyi, held that science advanced when autonomous scientists followed their best hunches and spontaneously coordinated their efforts as a result of their mutual dependence, in a setting devoted to scientific truth with a tradition supporting it, in a quest for a comprehensive understanding of reality. Pure science was for him an international community with the characteristics of the Republic of Letters of the past. This image of scien…Read more
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5Praxis and PracticesIn John Lachs Robert B. Talisse (ed.), Encyclopedia of Social Theory, Wiley-blackwell. 2005.
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6CausalityIn John Lachs Robert B. Talisse (ed.), Encyclopedia of Social Theory, Wiley-blackwell. 2005.
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10The 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
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5Durkheim as a Neo-Kantian PhilosopherIn Werner Gephart & Daniel Witte (eds.), The Sacred and the Law: The Durkheimian Legacy, Vittorio Klostermann. pp. 49-69. 2017.
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7Rural Sociology: A Slightly Personal HistoryIn Johannes Bakker (ed.), Rural Sociologists at Work: Candid Accounts of Theory, Method, and Practice, Routledge. 2015.This chapter presents a brief history of American Rural Sociology. It discusses the key early figures, such as C.J. Galpin, Kenyon Butterfield, Dwight Sanderson, and Thomas Carver Nixon. But the focus is on the next generation, and the distinctive institutional character of rural sociology as it developed in the twenties and thirties, and evolved in relation to events in the postwar period. Rural sociology shared many features with the “Social Survey” movement, including its commitment to commun…Read more
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5Mundane Theorizing, Bricolage, and BildungIn Richard Swedberg (ed.), Theorizing in Social Science: The Context of Discovery, Stanford University Press. 2014.
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5Blind Spot? Weber's Concept of Expertise and the Perplexing Case of ChinaIn Fanon Howell & Hector Vera (eds.), Max Weber Matters: Interweaving Past and Present, Routledge. 2008.This chapter analyses the Church's efforts in opposing The Da Vinci Code as a concerted bid to reinforce the ideological bulwark surrounding millennia-old structures of episcopal governance. It postulates that it was Church leaders sensing a challenge to Roman Catholicism's traditional manner of organizing and exercising power in the form of depersonalized office charisma that provoked the criticisms they mounted worldwide against The Da Vinci Code. Weber's discussion of models for the instituti…Read more
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16Universalism, Particularism, And Moral Change: Reflections On The Value-Normative Concepts Of The Social SciencesIn Nikolaĭ Genov (ed.), Global Trends and Regional Development, Routledge. 2011.It is worth beginning any discussion of the trends of universalization and particularization of value-normative systems with some refl ections on theory. Theories about values, norms, and morality are themselves closely related to the moralities they explain and to the moral outlook of those doing the explaining. A choice of a value is an act of faith, which echoes the Lutheran salvation doctrine of “justifi cation by faith alone.” The distance between these concepts and the “moral” ideas of Oce…Read more
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5Quasi-Science and the State: 'Governing Science' in Comparative PerspectiveIn Nico Stehr (ed.), The Governance of Knowledge, Routledge. 2016.This chapter shows that science and quasi-science are already largely subject to various forms of "governance," including forms of self-governance. In science, as with other debating societies, governance characteristically begins with the problem of membership and the problem of regulating participation in discussion. The standard solutions to the problem of governance in the external sense recognize the inability of public discussion of the sort "demanded" by Beck to deal effectively with scie…Read more
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3Religion and British Sociology: The Power and Necessity of the SpiritualIn J. Holmwood & J. Scott (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Sociology in Britain, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 97-122. 2014.Understanding the role of religion in early British sociology, as well as its fate in later sociology, requires a variety of perspectives: one is intellectual and concerns the various forms that the topic of religion took for British sociology. Another is organisational and ecological. British sociology as embodied in the Sociological Society was a part of a vast array of organisations that were part of a massive movement of social reform, international in scope, and motivated largely by the new…Read more
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16Introduction: Tacit Knowledge: Between Habit and PresuppositionIn Stephen P. Turner (ed.), Understanding the Tacit, Routledge. 2013.Harry Collins is a science studies scholar no other description fits without qualification who has contributed enormously to the discussion of tacit knowledge. Collins says that he is providing an account for the ontologically bashful, meaning, presumably, that it does not carry the burdens of Durkheim's notion of the collective consciousness. Polanyi says that 'a wholly explicit knowledge is unthinkable'. Collins wants to translate this into 'strings must be interpreted before they are meaningf…Read more
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11Introduction to "The Politics of Expertise"In Stephen P. Turner (ed.), The Politics of Expertise, Routledge. 2013.The standard issues with experts are about the nature of scientifi c expertise; problems of legitimacy and problems having to do with the limits of expertise; problems having to do with the place of experts in democratic politics and bureaucracies; as well as more general problems about the knowledge that experts possess: what the role of tacit knowledge and knowledge embodied in things and routines is, and to what extent expertise can be replaced or augmented by expert systems and technical mean…Read more
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6"Net Effects": A Short HistoryIn Vaughn R. McKim & Stephen P. Turner (eds.), Causality In Crisis?: Statistical Methods & Search for Causal Knowledge in Social Sciences, Notre Dame Press. pp. 23-45. 1997.
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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
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4Functionalism, Field Theories, and Unintended ConsequencesIn Gianluca Manzo (ed.), Theories and Social Mechanisms, The Bardwell Press. pp. 229-251. 2015.
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3Introduction: Social Theory and SociologyIn Stephen P. Turner (ed.), Social Theory and Sociology: The Classics and Beyond, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 1-16. 1996.
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21Kohlberg's Critique of Durkheim's Moral EducationIn W. S. F. Pickering & Geoffrey Walford (eds.), Durkheim and Modern Education, Routledge. 2002.Lawrence Kohlberg's writings on moral education remain the greatest influ-- ence on moral education today in the United States. His student, Carol Gilligan, is one of the most influential writers on feminist ethics and on the idea that there are gender differences in morals. In a remarkable passage, Kohlberg described Emile Durkheim's conception as 'the most philosophi-- cally and scientifically comprehensive, clear and workable approach to moral education extant'. He went on to say that the wor…Read more
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3Kelsen: Methodological Individualism in the Social Theory of LawIn Nathalie Bulle & Francesco Di Iorio (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Methodological Individualism: Volume II, Springer Verlag. pp. 53-76. 2023.The status and nature of the state have been the traditional source of claims about the reality of supra-individual social entities. Kelsen was the dissolver of this problematic, by asserting the identity of state and law, and asserting that law was the authorized actions of individuals. But this required an account of the origin of law itself. He traced this to pre-state law, and the normative order of retribution, which he explained as part of a primitive mentality that depended on an undevelo…Read more
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2Making Collective Practices into Psychological Facts: The Russian Psychology ModelIn Raffaela Giovagnoli & Robert Lowe (eds.), The Logic of Social Practices II, Springer Nature Switzerland. pp. 2-20. 2023.Universal Logic is the study of the formal properties of logical systems in terms of the ways in which these formal features are found across systems of various kinds. A crucial example of this problematic is found at the heart of cognitive science. Brains are computers or computer-like things. But the digital logic of computers and the logic of computer programs do not correspond in any direct way with the processes of brains, either at the neural level, or at the level of psychological descrip…Read more
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A Disobedient Generation: 68ers and the Transformation of Social Theory (edited book)SAGE Publications Ltd.. 2005.
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1Causality (edited book)SAGE Publications Ltd.. 2010.This four volume major reference work covers the main issues, methods of analysis, and alternatives, of causality, including the classic texts applying these alternative concepts and methods to empirical cases. The volumes give a substantial historical and philosophical introduction relevant to the concerns of practitioners. As a whole, the volumes represent a complete guide to the literature on social science causality from the beginning to the present.
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19Stephen Turner has explored the ongms of social science in this pioneering study of two nineteenth century themes: the search for laws of human social behavior, and the accumulation and analysis of the facts of such behavior through statistical inquiry. The disputes were vigorously argued; they were over questions of method, criteria of explanation, interpretations of probability, understandings of causation as such and of historical causation in particular, and time and again over the ways of u…Read more
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21Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology: A volume in Handbook of the Philosophy of Science (edited book)Elsevier. 2007.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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23Sociological Explanation As TranslationCambridge Scholars Press. 1980.First published in 1980, this book examines the nature of sociological explanation. The tactics of interpretive sociology have often remained obscure because of confusion over the nature of the evidence for interpretation and the nature of decisions among alternative interpretations. In providing an account of the problem of interpretive sociological claims, the author argues that there is rationality to interpretation. He also presents a fresh view of the relationship between qualitative and st…Read more
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