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175Thomas Kuhn's misunderstood relation to Kripke-Putnam essentialismJournal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 33 (1): 151-158. 2002.Kuhn's ‘taxonomic conception’ of natural kinds enables him to defend and re-specify the notion of incommensurability against the idea that it is reference, not meaning/use, that is overwhelmingly important. Kuhn's ghost still lacks any reason to believe that referentialist essentialism undercuts his central arguments in SSR – and indeed, any reason to believe that such essentialism is even coherent, considered as a doctrine about anything remotely resembling our actual science. The actual relati…Read more
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101Do the right thing! Rule finitism, rule scepticism and rule followingHuman Studies 22 (2-4): 193-210. 1999.Rule following is often made an unnecessary mystery in the philosophy of social science. One form of mystification is the issue of 'rule finitism', which raises the puzzle as to how a learner can possibly extend the rule to applications beyond those examples which have been given as instruction in the rule. Despite the claim that this problem originated in the work of Wittgenstein, it is clear that his philosophical method is designed to evaporate, not perpetuate, such problems. The supposed pro…Read more
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87Action, Description, Redescription and Concept Change: A Reply to Fuller and RothHistory of the Human Sciences 16 (2): 101-115. 2003.
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74Kuhn: philosopher of scientific revolutionsPolity. 2002.Thomas Kuhn's shadow hangs over almost every field of intellectual inquiry. His book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has become a modern classic. His influence on philosophy, social science, historiography, feminism, theology, and (of course) the natural sciences themselves is unparalleled. His epoch-making concepts of 'new paradigm' and 'scientific revolution' make him probably the most influential scholar of the twentieth century. Sharrock and Read take the reader through Kuhn's work i…Read more
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56Where do the limits of experience lie? Abandoning the dualism of objectivity and subjectivityHistory of the Human Sciences 21 (3): 70-93. 2008.The relationship between 'subjective' and 'objective' features of social reality (and between 'subjectivist' and 'objectivist' sociological approaches) remains problematic within social thought. Phenomenology is often taken as a paradigmatic example of subjectivist sociology, since it supposedly places exclusive emphasis on actors' 'subjective' interpretations, thereby neglecting 'objective' social structures. In this article, we question whether phenomenology is usefully understood as falling o…Read more
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54Does Thomas Kuhn have a 'model of science'?Social Epistemology 17 (2-3): 293-296. 2003.No abstract
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53A disagreement over agreement and consensus in constructionist sociologyJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 23 (1). 1993.
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43Mathematical relativism: Logic, grammar, and arithmetic in cultural comparisonJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 36 (2). 2006.
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39Indeterminacy in the past?History of the Human Sciences 15 (3): 95-115. 2002.This article discusses some issues that arise from the fact of `conceptual change'. We focus on the difficulties that Ian Hacking encountered when considering whether the consequence of conceptual change is the fact that the past of individual actions is indeterminate (Hacking, 1995). We consider his use of Anscombe's thesis on actions under description and find that he misrepresents it. We further find that he neglects tenses of descriptions and redescriptions, the contrast of which is essentia…Read more
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37Iv. understanding Peter WinchInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 28 (1-4). 1985.Peter Winch's The Idea of a Social Science has been the subject of repeated misunderstanding. This discussion takes one recent example and shows how Winch's argument is gravely distorted. What is at issue is not, as is usually supposed, whether we can accept or endorse another society's explanations of its activities, but whether we have to look for an explanatory connection between concepts and action. Winch's argument is that before we can try to explain actions, we have to identify them corre…Read more
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36On the demise of the native: Some observations on and a proposal for ethnography (review)Human Studies 5 (1). 1982.
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34Computers, Minds and ConductPolity. 1995.This book provides a sustained and penetrating critique of a wide range of views in modern cognitive science and philosophy of the mind, from Turing's famous test for intelligence in machines to recent work in computational linguistic theory. While discussing many of the key arguments and topics, the authors also develop a distinctive analytic approach. Drawing on the methods of conceptual analysis first elaborated by Wittgenstein and Ryle, the authors seek to show that these methods still have …Read more
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31Changing the Past?History of the Human Sciences 16 (3): 105-121. 2003.The value of the notion of ‘indeterminacy in the past’ continues to be contested. Ian Hacking’s claim that the notion is perspicuous in the examination of historical instances is questioned through discussion of the possibility of retrospective application of the relatively recent diagnostic category ‘Post-traumatic stress disorder’. Kevin McMillan maintains that there are deeper philosophical merits to the idea–particularly with respect to questions of truth–but neither Hacking’s treatment of h…Read more
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29II. Wittgenstein and comparative sociologyInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 27 (1-4): 268-276. 1984.Focusing on a discussion by Ruddich and Stassen of the ?Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough?, this paper shows that some of the usual criticisms made by sociologists of Wittgenstein are misplaced. He does not reject causal explanations of beliefs and actions and replace them with some other form of explanation, but dismisses the idea that any explanation is called for here. His argument that the origin of the desire to explain beliefs is to be found in a misconceived parallel between science and ma…Read more
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26Tensions in Garfinkel’s Ethnomethodological Studies of Work Programme Discussed Through Livingston’s Studies of MathematicsHuman Studies 42 (2): 253-279. 2019.While Garfinkel’s early work, captured in Studies in Ethnomethodology, has received a lot of attention and discussion, this has not been the case for his later work since the 1970s. In this paper, we critically examine the aims of Garfinkel’s later ethnomethodological studies of work programme and evaluate key ideas such as the ‘missing what’ in the sociology of work, ‘the unique adequacy requirements of methods’, and the notion of ‘hybrid studies’. We do so through a detailed engagement with a …Read more
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25Cultural Analysis, by R. Wuthnow, J. D. Hunter, A. Bergesen and E. KurzweilJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 16 (2): 215-216. 1985.
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24That We Obey Rules Blindly Does Not Mean that We Are Blindly Subservient to RulesTheory, Culture and Society 25 (2): 33-50. 2008.
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18There is No Such Thing as Social Science: In Defence of Peter Winch (review)Analysis 69 (4): 795-797. 2009.This provocative, engaging and important book marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Peter Winch's seminal The Idea of a Social Science. The authors – the first two philosophers, the third a sociologist – have worked together in various permutations before. No-one familiar with their previous publications will be surprised that the dominant voice throughout is Wittgenstein's – that is, Wittgenstein as read ‘resolutely’ by ‘new Wittgensteinians’. They have three principal aims: firs…Read more
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16Praise for the First Edition: `Totally reliable... the authors have produced a book urgently needed by all those charged with introducing students to the classics... quite indispensable' - Times Higher Education Supplement This is a fully updated and expanded new edition of the successful undergraduate text. Providing a lucid examination of the pivotal theories of Marx, Durkheim and Weber, the authors submit that these figures have decisively shaped the discipline. They show how the classical ap…Read more
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16Fundamentals of ethnomethodologyIn Barry Smart & George Ritzer (eds.), Handbook of Social Theory, Sage Publications. pp. 249--259. 2001.