bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Postcolonial philosophy of science
Authors: Harding Sandra G.
Published: September 2018

Are there laws of nature that today’s modern sciences are ill-designed to discover? Does the universal use of these modern sciences require their value-neutrality, or are their social values and interests an important cause of their universality? What resources for scientific knowledge can other cultures’ science projects provide?

Such questions are raised by recent postcolonial global histories that focus analyses on the role of European expansion in the advance of modern science and in the decline of other cultures’ science traditions. These accounts challenge philosophers to re-evaluate unsuspected strengths in other scientific traditions and identify modern science’s borrowings from them. They also identify European cultural features that have, for better and worse, constituted modern sciences and their representations of nature and thus seek to develop more realistic and useful accounts of the values, interests, methods, universality, objectivity and rationality of science.
Functional explanation
Authors: Manning Richard N.
Published: September 2018

Explanations appealing to the functions of items are common in everyday discourse and in science: we say that the heart pumps blood because that is its function, and that the car fails to start because the ignition is not functioning. Moreover, we distinguish the functions things perform from other things they do: the heart makes a noise, but that is not one of its functions. Philosophical discussions in this area attempt to specify conditions under which it is appropriate to ascribe functions to items and under which it is appropriate to appeal to those functions in explanations. Difficulties arise because functions are normative: there is some sense in which items ought to perform their functions; failure to perform is a kind of error. Philosophical discussions investigate whether and how this normativity can be understood in scientifically respectable terms. This is important, because biological entities are among the most characteristically functional items. This issue gives rise to differing views as to what it is that functional explanations explain. One view is that they explain how a containing system achieves some goal or effect. Another is that functional explanations explain causally why the functional item exists.
Unity of science
Authors: Cat Jordi
Published: September 2018

How should our scientific knowledge be organized? Is scientific knowledge unified and, if so, does it mirror a unity of the world as a whole? Or is it merely a matter of simplicity and economy of thought? Either way, what sort of unity is it? If the world can be decomposed into elementary constituents, must our knowledge be in some way reducible to, or even replaced by, the concepts and theories describing such constituents? Can economics be reduced to microphysics, as Einstein claimed? Can sociology be derived from molecular genetics? Might the sciences be unified in the sense of all following the same method, whether or not they are all ultimately reducible to physics? Considerations of the unity problem begin at least with Greek cosmology and the question of the one and the many. In the late twentieth century the increasing tendency is to argue for the disunity of science and to deny reducibility to physics.
Laplace, Pierre-Simon (1749–1827)
Authors: Gillispie Charles C.
Published: September 2018

In company with Lagrange and Legendre, Laplace was one of the three foremost mathematicians during the half-century of French pre-eminence in science, from the 1770s into the 1820s. Although he invented or developed many mathematical techniques for solving various classes of problems, most notably generating functions, the Laplace transform, the Laplace expansion, the variation of constants, and the generalized gravitational function, he was more interested in what he could do with mathematics than with mathematics itself. His main treatises are Mécanique céleste (Celestial Mechanics) and Théorie analytique des probabilités (Analytical Theory of Probability). In addition he published Exposition du système du monde (Exposition of the System of the World) and Essai philosophique sur les probabilités (Philosophical Essay on Probability). Not exactly popularizations, the latter pair were verbal explanations of the two bodies of subject matter intended for a well-educated public. Both have gone through many editions. Though unrelated in content, the two main branches of Laplace’s work were related philosophically, celestial mechanics being concerned with the structure of the world, and probability with what we can know about it. In both respects Laplace’s motivation was to vindicate the Newtonian system of the world. In the later half of his life he developed an interest in physics and may be considered the impresario if not quite the founder of mathematical physics. He more than any other was responsible for the design of the metric system of weights and measures, a worldwide legacy of the French Revolution. A favourite of Napoleon, Laplace was a principal statesman of science during the Napoleonic period and afterwards.
Causation and laws in biology
Authors: Matthen Mohan
Published: September 2018

Physicalism appears to undermine the autonomy of ‘special sciences’ such as biology, and to leave little room for proprietary biological laws or causation. Mendel’s ‘Laws’ are so-called because they are fundamental to the subject-area, but since they describe causal processes that are wholly physical in nature, they seem to reduce to physical laws, given certain propositions about the composition of DNA. The same goes for other principles of the biological sciences.

This argument has been challenged by Hilary Putnam, on the grounds that good explanations, for instance in mathematical terms, could range more widely than any given physical realization. Putnam argues that mathematics could thus have an autonomous role in science despite physicalism. Putnam’s insight has been applied to classical genetics by Philip Kitcher. A gene is a unit of inheritance that passes unchanged from parent to offspring according to certain rules. It is these rules that are essential to understanding inheritance, not details of interaction in the DNA substrate. Putnam and Kitcher here employ a notion similar to Aristotle’s ‘formal causes’ – functional and structural determinants of biological characteristics that are somewhat independent of material constitution.

There are other conceptions of laws to be found in philosophy of science. Some think that they are propositions with the capacity to impart axiomatic structure to what is known about a domain. The principle of natural selection plays this role in biology, though it is a priori. Again, some think that laws are necessary truths: on cladistic systems of classification, the proposition that the common raven is a bird is arguably a law under this understanding.

The nature of causal patterns in natural selection has been a matter of some discussion recently. The view that individual-level causes are sufficient to explain selection-outcomes is tempting to the reductionist, but distorts the explanatory aims of evolutionary theory. Clearly, evolutionary theory requires population-level causes. On the other hand, it has been questioned whether natural selection itself should be understood as a ‘force’ acting on a population, somewhat in the same manner as gravitation acts on a body. Statistical views of natural selection seek alternatives to this way of understanding selection.

Finally, what are biological entities? Some ontologies admit no priority among collections of atoms – the argument is that an organism, for instance, is nothing more than such a collection. Many biologists, however, treat of composite entities as internally organized complex systems. On this view, cells, organisms, populations, and ecosystems have privileged ontological status.
Models in biology
Authors: Odenbaugh Jay
Published: September 2018

In recent years, much attention has been given by philosophers to the ubiquitous role of models and modelling in the biological sciences. Philosophical debate has focused on several areas of discussion. First, the term ‘model’ is applied to a bewildering array of objects in biology from mathematical structures, graphical displays, computer simulations, to concrete organisms. These objects seem so different as to raise the question of whether there is some one thing which a model is. Philosophers are investigating whether a unifying account of models can be found. Second, biologists rarely have fundamental theories as in physics and chemistry, but do have a variety of models. Many philosophers and biologists have suggested that biological theories are nothing more than a collection or family of models. Third, models are traditionally evaluated by their statistical fit to data or their explanatory power. However, biological models are highly idealized – literally false – which can undercut their empirical adequacy and explanatory worth. As a result, biological models are often evaluated for their heuristic functions, possibly unrelated to empirical adequacy and truth.
Units and levels of selection
Authors: Okasha Samir
Published: September 2018

In a standard Darwinian explanation, natural selection takes place at the level of the individual organism, i.e. some organisms enjoy a survival or reproduction advantage over others, which results in evolutionary change. In principle however, natural selection could operate at other hierarchical levels too, above and below that of the organism, for example the level of genes, cells, groups, colonies or even whole species. This possibility gives rise to the ‘levels of selection’ question in evolutionary biology. Group and colony-level selection have been proposed, originally by Darwin, as a means by which altruism can evolve. (In biology, ‘altruism’ refers to behaviour which entails a fitness cost to the individual so behaving, but benefits others.) Though this idea is still alive today, many theorists regard kin selection as a superior explanation for the existence of altruism. Kin selection arises from the fact that relatives share genes, so if an organism behaves altruistically towards its relatives, there is a greater than random chance that the beneficiary of the altruistic action will itself be an altruist. Kin selection is closely bound up with the ‘gene’s eye view’ of evolution, which holds that genes, not organisms, are the true beneficiaries of the evolutionary process. The gene’s eye approach to evolution, though heuristically valuable, does not in itself resolve the levels of selection question, because selection processes that occur at many hierarchical levels can all be seen from a gene’s eye viewpoint. In recent years, the levels of selection discussion has been re-invigorated, and subtly transformed, by the important new work on the ‘major evolutionary transitions’. These transitions occur when a number of free-living biological units, originally capable of surviving and reproducing alone, become integrated into a larger whole, giving rise to a new biological unit at a higher level of organization. Evolutionary transitions are intimately bound up with the levels of selection issue, because during a transition the potential exists for selection to operate simultaneously at two different hierarchical levels.
Modern synthesis, the
Authors: Plutynski Anya
Published: September 2018

Huxley coined the phrase, the ‘modern synthesis’ to refer to the acceptance by a vast majority of biologists in the mid-twentieth century of a ‘synthetic’ view of evolution. According to its main chroniclers, Mayr and Provine, the ‘synthesis’ consisted in the acceptance of natural selection acting on minor hereditary variation as the primary cause of both adaptive change within populations and major changes, such as speciation, and the evolution of higher taxa (e.g. families and genera). However, the dating and substance of the synthesis is controversial. The evolutionary synthesis may be broken down into two periods, the ‘early’ synthesis from 1918 to 1932, and the later, ‘modern synthesis’ from 1936 to 1947. The authors most commonly associated with the early synthesis are J. B. S. Haldane, R. A. Fisher, and S. Wright. These three authored a number of important advances; first, they demonstrated the compatibility of a Mendelian theory of inheritance with the results of Biometry, a study of the correlations of measures of traits between relatives. Second, they developed the theoretical framework for evolutionary biology, classical population genetics. This is a family of mathematical models representing evolution as change in genotype frequencies, from one generation to the next, as a product of selection, mutation, migration, and drift, or chance. Third, there was a broader synthesis of population genetics with cytology (cell biology), genetics, and biochemistry, as well as both empirical and mathematical demonstrations to the effect that very small selective forces acting over a relatively long time were able to generate substantial evolutionary change. The later ‘modern’ synthesis is most often identified with the work of Mayr, Dobzhansky and Simpson. There was a major institutional change in biology at this stage, insofar as different subdisciplines formerly housed in different departments, and using different methods, were united under the institutional umbrella of ‘evolutionary biology’. Mayr played an important role as a community architect, in founding the Society for the Study of Evolution, and the journal Evolution, which drew together work in systematics, biogeography, paleontology, and theoretical population genetics. The synthesis presents an occasion for addressing a number of important philosophical questions about the nature of theories, explanation, progress in science, theory unification, and reduction.
Evolutionary psychology
Authors: Shapiro Lawrence
Published: September 2018

Evolutionary psychology is a recent approach to understanding human psychology that takes as its starting point the fact that minds, just like hearts, kidneys, eyes, and thumbs, are the products of evolution. Evolutionary psychologists believe that an evolutionary perspective on psychology implies ontological and methodological commitments that sharply distinguish evolutionary psychology from other scientific theories of mind. Among the more important of these commitments are that minds consist of many (thousands, according to some) domain-specific modules that arose as adaptations during the Pleistocene epoch (roughly 1.8 million years to 11.5 thousand years ago). These adaptations are common to all human beings, and thus constitute a human nature. Study of these adaptations requires hypotheses about features of the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA), as well as about which psychological properties exhibit adaptive complexity. Most celebrated by evolutionary psychologists are their discoveries in the areas of mate preferences, social exchange, and parent–offspring conflict. Critics have objected that evolutionary psychology is untestable because hypotheses about the EEA cannot be tested, that evolutionary psychology is adaptationist to a fault, and that commitment to the existence of a human nature is inconsistent with evolutionary theory.
Models in physics
Authors: Frigg Roman
Published: September 2018

In its most common use, the term ‘model’ refers to a simplified and stylised version of the so-called target system, the part or aspect of the world that we are interested in. For instance, in order to determine the orbit of a planet moving around the sun we model the planet and the sun as perfect homogenous spheres that gravitationally interact with each other but nothing else in the universe, and then apply Newtonian mechanics to this system, which reveals that the planet moves on an elliptical orbit. Views diverge about what sort of entity such a model is. Those focusing on the formal aspects of models regard them either as equations or set-theoretical structures, while those opposed to such an approach take them to be descriptions or abstract (yet non-mathematical) entities. A further question concerns the relation of models and theories. In some cases models can be derived from theory simply by specifying the relevant determinables in a theory’s general equations. But many models cannot be obtained from theory in this straightforward way, and some even involve assumptions that contradict the fundamental theory. The relation of models to their respective target systems is equally complex and fraught with controversy. Two influential proposals take the relation between a model and its target to be isomorphism or similarity, respectively. This, however, has been criticised as too restrictive, since many models seem not to fit this mould.
Time, direction of
Authors: Uffink Jos
Published: September 2018

You can pour a tumblerful of water into the sea, but you can never get that same tumblerful of water out again. James Clerk Maxwell gave this as an example of an irreversible process. There are many other homely examples: coffee and milk will mix if stirred, but white coffee does not unmix if stirred in reverse. An ice cube in a glass of hot water will melt, but we never see water at room temperature spontaneously separate into ice and hot water. Physical theories like thermodynamics or hydrodynamics, which codify this type of irreversible phenomenon, do not allow the same kind of behaviour in the forward and backward direction of time. There is thus a striking asymmetry in the two temporal directions. This is usually referred to as the ‘direction of time’ (or ‘time asymmetry’ or ‘anisotropy’ or the ‘arrow of time’).

The source of this asymmetry has been sought in various theories of physics, both classical and quantum. Some explanations appeal to some sort of boundary condition, typically an initial condition, which the explanation admits to be, not a law of the theory, but a matter of happenstance. Other explanations advocate some additional general principle about, for example, temporally asymmetric notions of causality or randomness.
Critical realism
Authors: Collier Andrew
Published: September 2018

Critical realism is a movement in philosophy and the human sciences starting from Roy Bhaskar’s writings. It claims that causal laws state the tendencies of things grounded in their structures, not invariable conjunctions, which are rare outside experiments. Therefore, positivist accounts of science are wrong, but so is the refusal to explain the human world causally. Critical realism holds that there is more to ‘what is’ than ‘what is known’, more to powers than their use, and more to society than the individuals composing it. It rejects the widespread view that explanation is always neutral – to explain can be to criticize.
Economics, philosophy of
Authors: Hausman Daniel
Published: September 2018

People have thought about economics for as long as they have thought about how to manage their households, indeed Aristotle compared the study of the economic affairs of a city to the study of the management of a household. During the two millennia between Aristotle and Adam Smith, one finds reflections concerning economic problems mainly in the context of discussions of moral or policy questions. For example, scholastic philosophers commented on money and interest in inquiries concerning the justice of ‘usury’ (charging interest on money loans), and in the seventeenth century there was a great deal of discussion of policy concerning foreign trade. Economics only emerged as a distinct field of study with the bold eighteenth-century idea that there were ‘economies’ – that is autonomous law-governed systems of human interaction involving production, distribution and exchange. This view was already well developed in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, from which much of economics derives.

Economics is of philosophical interest in three main regards: it raises moral questions concerning welfare, justice and freedom; it raises foundational questions concerning the nature of rationality; and it raises methodological or epistemological questions concerning the character and possibility of knowledge of social phenomena. The fundamental theory of standard orthodox economics is of particular epistemological interest because of its resemblance to theories in the natural sciences coupled with its uneven empirical performance.

More than 150 years ago John Stuart Mill confronted the problem of how to reconcile his high regard for economics (despite its empirical adequacies) with his commitment to empiricism. His solution, which was accepted by most economists until the 1930s, held that the basic principles of economics are well established by introspection or everyday experience. One can thus justifiably have confidence in economics, despite the inexactness of its implications, which is only to be expected, since economics deals only with the most important determinants of economic phenomena.

In the 1930s Mill’s views were rejected as too dogmatic and insufficiently empirical. But the views that succeeded Mill’s during the generation after the Second World War, most notably the position of Milton Friedman and views deriving from the work of Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos, were less able to deal satisfactorily with the empirical inadequacies of economic theories than were Mill‘s. Since the mid 1980s there have been several new approaches, ranging from Donald McCloskey’s rejection of methodological assessment at one extreme to Alexander Rosenberg’s conclusion that economics cannot be a successful empirical science at the other.
Explanation in history and social science
Authors: Ruben David-Hillel
Published: September 2018

Historians and social scientists explain at least two sorts of things: (a) those individual human actions that have historical or social significance, such as Stalin’s decision to hold the show trials, Diocletian’s division of the Roman Empire, and the Lord Chief Justice’s attempt to reform the English judicial system; (b) historical and social events and structures (‘large-scale’ social phenomena), such as wars, economic depressions, social customs, the class system, the family, the state, and the crime rate. Philosophical questions arise about explanations of both kinds (a) and (b).

Concerning (b), perhaps the most pressing question is whether explanations of this sort can, ultimately, be understood as merely explanations of a large number of individual human actions, that is, as a complex set of explanations of the first kind, (a).

A causal explanation is an explanation of something in terms of its event-cause(s). Some explanations under (b) appear not to be causal explanations in this sense. There are two ways in which this appears to happen. First, we sometimes seem to explain a social structure or event by giving its function or purpose. This seems to be an explanation in terms of its effects rather than by its causes. For example, it might be claimed that the explanation for a certain social custom in a tribal society is the way in which it contributes to social stability or group solidarity. An explanation of a thing in terms of its effects cannot be a causal explanation of that thing. Second, we sometimes seem to cite social structure as the explanation of something. Whatever a social structure is, it is not itself an event, and since only (it is often said) events can be causes, such a ‘structural’ explanation does not seem to be a causal explanation.

A second question, then, about explanations of kind (b) is whether some of them, at any rate, are genuinely non-causal explanations, or whether functional and/or structural explanations of this sort can be seen as special sorts of causal explanation.

Explanations of kind (a) are a proper subset of explanations of human actions generally. Although some of the discussion of these issues began life as a distinct literature within the philosophy of history, it has now been absorbed into philosophical action theory more generally. Even so, a question that remains is just which proper subset of human actions are the ones of interest to the historical and social sciences: how can we discriminate within the class of human actions between those in which historians or social scientists have a legitimate interest and those outside their purview?
Functionalism in social science
Authors: Bigelow John C.
Published: September 2018

In the social sciences, functionalists are theorists who give an especially prominent role to functional explanations. One of the most influential self-defined functionalists, Malinowski (1926), summed up this view: the functionalist ‘insists… upon the principle that in every type of civilisation, every custom, material object, idea and belief fulfils some vital function, has some task to accomplish, represents an indispensable part within a working whole’. As an example of a functionalist explanation, one might consider the hypothesis, as argued for instance by Evans-Pritchard in his work on the Azande in Africa, that belief in witches generally plays a role in maintaining social stability (1937).

In the last few decades of the twentieth century, postmodern, or post-structuralist, sociologists have largely disavowed the pursuit of functional explanations. The extremism of some functionalist theses has been matched by an equal extremism in postmodern antitheses. In denying that everything must be explained functionally, some go so far as to say that nothing should ever be explained functionally.

Yet there is liveable logical space between the modernist’s ‘There has always got to be a reason, the real reason, for everything’, and the postmodernist’s ‘There is never any real reason for anything’. We do not have to be card-carrying functionalists to suspect that functional explanations might be found for at least some of the bewildering things that some people do in various parts of the world. New models of functional explanation are emerging from recent ferment in the biological sciences, and these new models may suggest new ways of approaching functional explanations in the social sciences.
Holism and individualism in history and social science
Authors: Bhargava Rajeev
Published: September 2018

Methodological individualists such as Mill, Weber, Schumpeter, Popper, Hayek and Elster argue that all social facts must be explained wholly and exhaustively in terms of the actions, beliefs and desires of individuals. On the other hand, methodological holists, such as Durkheim and Marx, tend in their explanations to bypass individual action. Within this debate, better arguments exist for the view that explanations of social phenomena without the beliefs and desires of agents are deficient. If this is so, individualists appear to have a distinct edge over their adversaries. Indeed, a consensus exists among philosophers and social scientists that holism is implausible or false and individualism, when carefully formulated, is trivially true.

Holists challenge this consensus by first arguing that caricatured formulations of holism that ignore human action must be set aside. They then ask us to re-examine the nature of human action. Action is distinguished from mere behaviour by its intentional character. This much is uncontested between individualists and holists. But against the individualist contention that intentions exist as only psychological states in the heads of individuals, the holist argues that they also lie directly embedded in irreducible social practices, and that the identification of any intention is impossible without examining the social context within which agents think and act. Holists find nothing wrong with the need to unravel the motivations of individuals, but they contend that these motivations cannot be individuated without appeal to the wider beliefs and practices of the community. For instance, the acquiescence of oppressed workers may take the form not of total submission but subtle negotiation that yields them sub-optimal benefits. Insensitivity to social context may blind us to this. Besides, it is not a matter of individual beliefs and preferences that this strategy is adopted. That decisions are taken by subtle strategies of negotiation rather than by explicit bargaining, deployment of force or use of high moral principles is a matter of social practice irreducible to the conscious action of individuals.

Two conclusions follow if the holist claim is true. First, that a reference to a social entity is inescapable even when social facts are explained in terms of individual actions, because of the necessary presence of a social ingredient in all individual intentions and actions. Second, a reference to individual actions is not even necessary when social facts are explained or understood in terms of social practices. Thus, the individualist view that explanation in social science must rely wholly and exhaustively on individual entities is hotly contested and is not as uncontroversial or trivial as it appears.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1908–2009)
Authors: Harris Olivia
Published: September 2018

Lévi-Strauss is one of the outstanding figures of mid-twentieth century intellectual life, influential far beyond the boundaries of France or the French language, and he has continued to write new work well into his eighties. His name is linked above all to the structuralist movement, of which he has been probably the most single-minded and unwavering exponent, and he was one of the key figures in the experiment of applying the insights of linguistics to the material of the social sciences. Through his work, public recognition of the discipline of anthropology grew dramatically to become an important element in discussion of philosophical issues.

The philosophical environment in France, in which structuralism developed and against which it reacted, was that of Sartrean humanism. In contrast to the existentialist emphasis on individual subjectivity, structuralism expected to find objective solutions to problems in the study of human beings. It was a form of intellectual modernism, a radical break with previous theoretical models and philosophical traditions, symptomatic of post-war optimism for the global applicability of science. It was hostile to metaphysics, bracketed the search for truth and was indifferent to the human subject. And, in contrast to Bergson’s emphasis on continuity and flux, structuralism took discontinuity as its founding principle.
Positivism in the social sciences
Authors: Kincaid Harold
Published: September 2018

Positivism originated from separate movements in nineteenth-century social science and early twentieth-century philosophy. Key positivist ideas were that philosophy should be scientific, that metaphysical speculations are meaningless, that there is a universal and a priori scientific method, that a main function of philosophy is to analyse that method, that this basic scientific method is the same in both the natural and social sciences, that the various sciences should be reducible to physics, and that the theoretical parts of good science must be translatable into statements about observations. In the social sciences and the philosophy of the social sciences, positivism has supported the emphasis on quantitative data and precisely formulated theories, the doctrines of behaviourism, operationalism and methodological individualism, the doubts among philosophers that meaning and interpretation can be scientifically adequate, and an approach to the philosophy of social science that focuses on conceptual analysis rather than on the actual practice of social research. Influential criticisms have denied that scientific method is a priori or universal, that theories can or must be translatable into observational terms, and that reduction to physics is the way to unify the sciences. These criticisms have undercut the motivations for behaviourism and methodological individualism in the social sciences. They have also led many to conclude, somewhat implausibly, that any standards of good social science are merely matters of rhetorical persuasion and social convention.
Post-structuralism in the social sciences
Authors: Gutting Gary
Published: September 2018

Structuralism was a twentieth-century approach in various social scientific disciplines (the ‘human sciences’) that promised to put them on a solid scientific basis. The origin and model of structuralism was Saussure’s work in linguistics. Saussure’s approach was later adapted in anthropology (by Lévi-Strauss), in psychoanalysis (by Lacan), and in literary theory (by Barthes). The core of structuralism was the treatment of distinctively human domains as formal structures in which meanings were constituted not by conscious subjects but by relations among the elements of a formal system.

Post-structuralism comprises a variety of reactions to structuralism, primarily by philosophers such as Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, and Lyotard. The first stage of post-structuralist reflection on the social sciences, best represented by Foucault’s discussion at the end of The Order of Things, accepted the structuralist approach and drew from it the philosophical consequences for our understanding of the social sciences. A later stage (including Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and Lyotard’s writings from the 1970s on) sought to transform our conception of the human sciences through a critique of structuralist presuppositions. In this later stage, post-structuralists continued to accept structuralism’s elimination of the conscious subject but maintained that human existence could not be adequately understood without taking account of non-structural causal factors such as power (Foucault) and desire (Lyotard). Foucault argued for the inextricable tie between our knowledge of society and society’s power structures. Lyotard maintained that Lacan’s structuralist version of psychoanalysis ignored the way that desire corresponds to a reality that escapes the boundaries of any formal structure. He also developed a political and ethical stance based on the fundamental value of a plurality of desires.
Rationality and cultural relativism
Authors: Simon Lawrence H.
Published: September 2018

Under what conditions may we judge the practices or beliefs of another culture to be rationally deficient? Is it possible that cultures can differ so radically as to embody different and even incommensurable modes of reasoning? Are norms of rationality culturally relative, or are there culture-independent norms of rationality that can be used to judge the beliefs and practices of all human cultures?

In order to be in a position to make judgments about the rationality of another culture, we must first understand it. Understanding a very different culture itself raises philosophical difficulties. How do we acquire the initial translation of the language of the culture? Can we use our categories to understand the social practices of another culture, for instance, our categories of science, magic and religion? Or would the mapping of our categories on to the practices of culturally distant societies yield a distorted picture of how they construct social practices and institutions?

A lively debate has revolved around these questions. Part of the debate involves clarifying the difficult concepts of rationality and relativism. What sort of judgments of rationality are appropriate? Judgments about how agents’ reasons relate to their actions? Judgments about how well agents’ actions and social practices conform to the norms of their culture? Or judgments about the norms of rationality of cultures as such? Can relativism be given a coherent formulation that preserves the apparent disagreements for which it is meant to account?

Can there be incommensurable cultures, such that one culture could not understand the other? According to Donald Davidson’s theory of interpretation, radical translation requires the use of a principle of charity that in effect rules out the possibility of incommensurable cultures. If this result is accepted, then a strong form of cultural relativism concerning norms of rationality is also ruled out.

Davidson’s theory, some argue, does not eliminate the possibility of attributing irrational beliefs and practices to agents in other cultures, and thus still leaves some room for debate about how to understand and evaluate such beliefs and practices. Three positions frame the debate. The intellectualist position holds that judgments of rationality are in order across cultures. The symbolist and functionalist positions, here taken together, try to avoid such judgments by attributing functions or symbolic meanings to cultural practices that are generally not understood as such by the agents. The fideist position, wary of too easily being ethnocentric, assumes a more relativist stance with regard to cross-cultural judgments of rationality.
Social norms
Authors: Gilbert Margaret
Published: September 2018

A social norm may be defined as the rule of a particular social group. That men are to open doors for women, for instance, may be the rule of a particular group. But what is it for a group to have a rule, according to our everyday understanding? Philosophers have disagreed on this point. An important general issue is whether a group’s having a rule is a matter of some or all of its members individually conforming to the rule or individually accepting the rule as a standard of behaviour for the group. An alternative type of account invokes the idea of the group’s members jointly, rather than individually, accepting the rule, in effect agreeing to conform to it. It can be argued that this less individualistic account better explains the way in which people criticize deviations from social norms.
Sociology, theories of
Authors: Alexander Jeffrey C.
Published: September 2018

Throughout the history of sociology, three types of theorizing have co-existed, sometimes uneasily. ‘Theories of’ provide abstract models of empirical processes; they function both as guides for sociological research and as sources for covering laws whose falsification or validation is intended to provide the basis for a cumulative science. ‘Presuppositional studies’ abstract away from particular empirical processes, seeking instead to articulate the fundamental properties of social action and order; meta-methodological warrants for the scientific investigation of societies; and normative foundations for moral evaluations of contemporary social life. ‘Hermeneutical theory’ addresses these basic sociological questions more indirectly, by interpreting the meanings and intentions of classical texts.

The relation between these three forms of theorizing varies historically. In the post-war period, under the institutional and intellectual influence of US sociologists like Parsons and Merton, presuppositional and hermeneutical issues seemed to be settled; ‘theories of’ proliferated and prospects seemed bright for a cumulative, theoretically-organized science of society. Subsequent social and intellectual developments undermined this brief period of relative consensus. In the midst of the crises of the 1960s and 1970s, presuppositional and hermeneutical studies gained much greater importance, and became increasingly disarticulated from empirical ‘theories of’. Confronting the prospect of growing fragmentation, in the late 1970s and early 1980s there appeared a series of ambitious, synthetical works that sought to reground the discipline by providing coherent examples of how the different forms of sociological theory could once again be intertwined. While widely read inside and outside the discipline, these efforts failed in their foundational ambitions.

As a result of this failure, over the last decade sociological theory has had diminishing influence both inside the discipline and without. Inside social science, economic and anthropological theories have been much more influential. In the broader intellectual arena, the most important presuppositional and hermeneutical debates have occurred in philosophy and literary studies. Sociological theorists are now participating in these extra-disciplinary debates even as they have returned to the task of developing ‘theories of’ particular institutional domains. The future of specifically sociological theory depends on reviving coherent relationships between these different theoretical domains.
Statistics and social science
Authors: Spirtes Peter
Published: September 2018

There are a number of distinct uses for statistics in the social sciences. One use is simply to provide a summary description of complicated features in a population.

A second use of statistics is to predict (some) features of a unit or group in a population, given other features of the unit or group. For example, a company may charge lower health insurance rates for people who do not smoke, because smokers have a lower risk of lung cancer. Some companies could also charge lower health insurance rates for people who do not have a heavy cough, because the probability of having lung cancer is lower for such people. Predictions can be made by developing a probabilistic model of the joint distribution of incidence of smoking, lung cancer, and incidence of heavy coughs in the population.

A third use of statistics is to help predict the probable effects of adopting different policies. For example, the government may consider a number of alternative policies for reducing the rate of lung cancer. One policy would ban smoking. Another policy would make everyone who coughs take cough medicine. Both smoking and coughing are predictors of lung cancer. But because smoking is a cause of lung cancer, while coughing is an effect of lung cancer, the first policy seems as if it might achieve the desired effect, while the second does not. In order to answer policy questions we need to know not only how the variables are distributed in the actual population, but also how they are causally related. A causal model specifies the causal relations between features in a population, as well as specifying a probability distribution of the features. Statistical information together with causal information can be used to predict the effects of adopting a certain policy.

A fourth use of statistics is in helping decide which policies should be adopted in order to achieve specific goals. Such decisions are based not only on the probable effects of each policy, but also on assigning different utilities to each possible outcome. This use of statistics is a branch of decision theory.
Structuralism in social science
Authors: Schatzki Theodore R.
Published: September 2018

Any school of thought in the social sciences that stresses the priority of order over action is ‘structural’. In the twentieth century, however, ‘structuralism’ has been used to denote a European, largely French language, school of thought that applied methods and conceptions of order developed in structural linguistics to a wide variety of cultural and social phenomena. Structuralism aspired to be a scientific approach to language and social phenomena that, in conceiving of them as governed by autonomous law-governed structures, minimized consideration of social-historical context and individual as well as collective action. Structural linguistics was developed in the early part of the twentieth century primarily by the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure. After the Second World War, it fostered roughly three phases of structural approaches to social phenomena. Under the lead of above all the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, classical structuralism applied structural linguistic conceptions of structure with relatively little transformation to such social phenomena as kinship structures, myths, cooking practices, religion and ideology. At the same time, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan appropriated Saussure’s conceptual apparatus to retheorize the Freudian unconscious. In the 1960s, a second phase of structural thought, neo-structuralism, extended structural linguistic notions of order to a fuller spectrum of social phenomena, including knowledge, politics and society as a whole. Many of Saussure’s trademark conceptions were abandoned, however, during this phase. Since the 1970s, a third phase of structuralism has advanced general theories of social life that centre on how structures govern action. In so refocusing structural theory, however, the new structuralists have broken with the conception of structure that heretofore reigned in structural thought.
Symbolic interactionism
Authors: Brittan Arthur
Published: September 2018

Symbolic interactionism is in the main a US sociological and social psychological perspective that has focused on the reciprocal relationship between language, identity and society. Philosophically it has largely been associated with pragmatists such as James (1907), Mead (1934), Dewey (1922) and Pierce (1958), although in the European context it has affinities with hermeneutics and phenomenology. In addition, it has links with various ‘dramaturgical’ approaches to communication that emphasize the interactive processes underpinning the construction, negotiation, presentation and affirmation of the self. In brief, symbolic interactionism is premised on the supposition that human beings are ‘active’ and not ‘reactive’.

Although it is not easy to spell out the central propositions of Symbolic Interactionism in a systematic way, nevertheless, most of its proponents are committed to an interactive view of self and society, that is, they take issue with those views that see the social world as a seamless unity that completely encapsulates and determines individual conduct.
Weber, Max (1864–1920)
Authors: Turner Stephen P. , Factor Regis A.
Published: September 2018

Max Weber, German economist, historian, sociologist, methodologist, and political thinker, is of philosophical significance for his attempted reconciliation of historical relativism with the possibility of a causal social science; his notion of a verstehende (understanding) sociology; his formulation, use and epistemic account of the concept of ‘ideal types’; his views on the rational irreconcilability of ultimate value choices, and particularly his formulation of the implications for ethical political action of the conflict between ethics of conviction and ethics of responsibility; and his sociological account of the causes and uniqueness of the western rationalization of life.

These topics are closely related: Weber argued that the explanatory interests of the historian and social scientist vary historically and that the objects of their interest were constituted in terms of cultural points of view, and that consequently their categories are ultimately rooted in evaluations, and hence subjective. But he also argued that social science cannot dispense with causality, and that once the categories were chosen, judgments of causality were objective. The explanatory interests of the sociologist, as he defined sociology, were in understanding intentional action causally, but in terms of categories that were culturally significant, such as ‘rational action’. Much of his influence flowed from his formulation of the cultural situation of the day, especially the idea that the fate of the time was to recognize that evaluations were inescapably subjective and that the world had no inherent ‘meaning’. The existential implications of this novel situation for politics and learning were strikingly formulated by him: science could not tell us how to live; politics was as a choice between warring Gods. Weber’s scholarly work and his politics served as a model for Karl Jaspers, and a subject of criticism and analysis for other philosophers, such as Karl Löwith, Max Scheler, and the Frankfurt School.