Social theory and agent architectures - Prospective issues in rapid-discovery social science
This article interleaves two themes: (a) the prospective role of agent simulation in developing a high-consensus, rapid-discovery social science and (b) the use of situation modeling to illustrate how the interaction of social theory and agent architectures may contribute toward such a development. The first theme suggests that computational techniques have the potential to contribute to the advancement of broadly shared social science goals. The second theme uses a relatively specialized epistemological focus, the social situation as a focus of attention and action, to illustrate how agent architectures based on that focus may contribute to scientific progress and, in particular, how they may need to evolve. Situationist epistemology is invoked to convey the important role of ontological assumptions and architectural frameworks in social scientific modeling but also to advance situational models within multilevel social theory.
agent simulation scientific discovery paradigm shift situation theory social emergence