In this captivating yet troubling book, Ian Shapiro offers a searing indictment of many influential practices in the social sciences and humanities today. Perhaps best known for his critique of ...rational choice theory, Shapiro expands his purview here. In discipline after discipline, he argues, scholars have fallen prey to inward-looking myopia that results from—and perpetuates—a flight from reality. In the method-driven academic culture we inhabit, argues Shapiro, researchers too often make display and refinement of their techniques the principal scholarly activity. The result is that they lose sight of the objects of their study. Pet theories and methodological blinders lead unwelcome facts to be ignored, sometimes not even perceived. The targets of Shapiro's critique include the law and economics movement, overzealous formal and statistical modeling, various reductive theories of human behavior, misguided conceptual analysis in political theory, and the Cambridge school of intellectual history.
Originating in the late 19th century and becoming the subject of ongoing methodological debates in the social sciences, methodological individualism is a paradigm that focuses on understanding social ...phenomena through the actions and choices of individuals rather than through collective explanations. This book highlights its theoretical bases as defined and developed in the writings of its founders and early proponents in the context of the liveliest methodological battles in the social sciences. It addresses fundamental epistemological issues, including the distinction between explanation in the social sciences and natural sciences, the rational bases for understanding social actions, the relation of social wholes to their parts, and the connections between social concepts and the phenomenal world. Bringing together new English translations of foundational texts by Carl Menger, Joseph Schumpeter, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber, this book provides key insights into one of the essential methodological paradigms in the social sciences, corrects misconceptions, and advances a deeper understanding of methodological individualism as a robust and valuable approach to explaining social phenomena. It will therefore appeal to scholars and students of sociology and sociological theory with an interest in questions of social science methodology.
Generative social science Epstein, Joshua M; Epstein, Joshua M
2011., 20120102, 2012, 2007, 2007-01-01, 20060101, Volume:
21
eBook
Agent-based computational modeling is changing the face of social science. In Generative Social Science, Joshua Epstein argues that this powerful, novel technique permits the social sciences to meet ...a fundamentally new standard of explanation, in which one "grows" the phenomenon of interest in an artificial society of interacting agents: heterogeneous, boundedly rational actors, represented as mathematical or software objects. After elaborating this notion of generative explanation in a pair of overarching foundational chapters, Epstein illustrates it with examples chosen from such far-flung fields as archaeology, civil conflict, the evolution of norms, epidemiology, retirement economics, spatial games, and organizational adaptation. In elegant chapter preludes, he explains how these widely diverse modeling studies support his sweeping case for generative explanation.
This volume contends that Evidential Pluralism—an account of the epistemology of causation, which maintains that in order to establish a causal claim one needs to establish the existence of a ...correlation and the existence of a mechanism—can be fruitfully applied to the social sciences. Through case studies in sociology, economics, political science and law, it advances new philosophical foundations for causal enquiry in the social sciences. The book provides an account of how to establish and evaluate causal claims and it offers a new way of thinking about evidence-based policy, basic social science research and mixed methods research. As such, it will appeal to scholars with interests in social science research and methodology, the philosophy of science and evidence-based policy.
In the early 1900s, physics was the archetypical science and measurement was equated with mathematization to real numbers. To enable the use of mathematics to draw empirical conclusions about ...psychological data, which was often ordinal, Stevens redefined measurement as “the assignment of numerals to objects and events according to a rule.” He defined four scales of measurement (nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio) and set out criteria for the permissible statistical tests to be used with each. Stevens' scales of measurement are still widely used in data analysis in the social sciences. They were revolutionary but flawed, leading to ongoing debate about the permissibility of the use of different statistical tests on different scales of data. Stevens implicitly assumed measurement involved mapping to real numbers. Rather than rely on Stevens' scales, researchers should demonstrate the mathematical properties of their data and map to analogous number sets, making claims regarding mathematization explicit, defending them with evidence, and using only those operations that are defined for that set.
Why postmortems fail Jervis, Robert
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
01/2022, Volume:
119, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Most high-profile disasters are followed by demands for an investigation into what went wrong. Even before they start, calls for finding the missed warning signs and an explanation for why people did ...not "connect the dots" will be common. Unfortunately, however, the same combination of political pressures and the failure to adopt good social science methods that contributed to the initial failure usually lead to postmortems that are badly flawed. The high stakes mean that powerful actors will have strong incentives to see that certain conclusions are-and are not-drawn. Most postmortems also are marred by strong psychological biases, especially the assumption that incorrect inferences must have been the product of wrong ways of thinking, premature cognitive closure, the naive use of hindsight, and the neglect of the comparative method. Given this experience, I predict that the forthcoming inquiries into the January 6, 2021, storming of the US Capitol and the abrupt end to the Afghan government will stumble in many ways.
Disruptions as Opportunities: Governing Chinese Society with Interactive Authoritarianism addresses the long-standing puzzle of why China outlived other one-party authoritarian regimes with ...particular attention to how the state manages an emerging civil society. Drawing upon over 1,200 survey responses conducted in 126 villages in the Sichuan province, as well as 70 interviews conducted with Civil Society Organization (CSO) leaders and government officials, participant observation, and online research, the book proposes a new theory of interactive authoritarianism to explain how an adaptive authoritarian state manages nascent civil society. Sun argues that when new phenomena and forces are introduced into Chinese society, the Chinese state adopts a three-stage interactive approach toward societal actors: toleration, differentiation, and legalization without institutionalization. Sun looks to three disruptions—earthquakes, internet censorship, and social-media-based guerilla resistance to the ride-sharing industry—to test his theory about the three-stage interactive authoritarian approach and argues that the Chinese government evolves and consolidates its power in moments of crisis.
Numerous popular and scholarly accounts have exposed the deep impact of patrons on the production of scientific knowledge and its applications.Shaky Foundationsprovides the first extensive ...examination of a new patronage system for the social sciences that emerged in the early Cold War years and took more definite shape during the 1950s and early 1960s, a period of enormous expansion in American social science.
By focusing on the military, the Ford Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, Mark Solovey shows how this patronage system presented social scientists and other interested parties, including natural scientists and politicians, with new opportunities to work out the scientific identity, social implications, and public policy uses of academic social research. Solovey also examines significant criticisms of the new patronage system, which contributed to widespread efforts to rethink and reshape the politics-patronage-social science nexus starting in the mid-1960s.
Based on extensive archival research,Shaky Foundationsaddresses fundamental questions about the intellectual foundations of the social sciences, their relationships with the natural sciences and the humanities, and the political and ideological import of academic social inquiry.
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