This 2006 introduction to the philosophy of social science provides an original conception of the task and nature of social inquiry. Peter Manicas discusses the role of causality seen in the physical ...sciences and offers a reassessment of the problem of explanation from a realist perspective. He argues that the fundamental goal of theory in both the natural and social sciences is not, contrary to widespread opinion, prediction and control, or the explanation of events (including behaviour). Instead, theory aims to provide an understanding of the processes which, together, produce the contingent outcomes of experience. Offering a host of concrete illustrations and examples of critical ideas and issues, this accessible book will be of interest to students of the philosophy of social science, and social scientists from a range of disciplines.
Post-secondary education is a massive globalizing industry with a potential for growth that cannot be overestimated. By 2010 there will be 100 million people in the world, all fully qualified to ...proceed from secondary to tertiary education, but there will be no room left on any campus. A distinguished panel of scholars and educational administrators from the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Pacific was asked to speak on the complexities of globalized higher education from their positions of concern and expertise and then engage in a dialogue. The result is this timely and important work. Globalization and Higher Education aims to energize readers into rethinking higher education. It succeeds by dealing thoughtfully and provocatively with pertinent issues that cut across and transcend national boundaries as well as very different points of view.
John Dewey and American Psychology Manicas, Peter T.
Journal for the theory of social behaviour,
September 2002, Letnik:
32, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
John Dewey is always included as critical player in the development of psychology in America, but his relationship to this development is nearly always misunderstood. Argues that there is a double ...irony in this. Contrary to the received opinion, Dewey played no role in the development of American psychology. The confusion depends on the view that American psychology 'got its mind from Darwin' and dealt with 'a mind in use.' It also depends on the assumption that Dewey was a powerful advocate of the view that 'the social sciences would produce the kind of positivist knowledge that could establish rational control over society and history' (Ross, 1991). Considers Dewey's place in the development of American psychology. Argues that Dewey came to believe that psychology ill served what became his primary intellectual goal, and that philosophy must address the problems of humankind. Dewey's 'Logic' gives prophetic insights into the most fruitful approaches, an ecologically oriented, biologically grounded cognitive science, and shows decisively why 'symbolic' AI models must fail. (Original abstract - amended)
Salient features of a new philosophy of science that has developed over the past few decades are identified and their implications for psychology drawn. All science only approaches closure in the ...laboratory; outside of the laboratory, the world is radically open. Although scientific theory is equally valid in and out of the laboratory, it is not sufficient to explain behavior, nor is it easily applied. Neither natural nor social science has as its central role the explanation and prediction of individual behavior. Just as the application of physics requires engineering technology, explaining the behavior of particular individuals requires not only psychological theory but also situational, biographical, and historical information. (64 ref)
A proper understanding of both the limits and strengths of futures research requires some commitments both in the philosophy of science and in the philosophy of history. For example, those who ...believe that science explains by subsumption under laws hold that explanation and prediction are symmetrical. Similarly, those who believe that history is law-governed cannot find an appropriate place for contingency in history. On the view argued here, one can always explain where one could not predict. On the other hand, if it is acknowledged that action is structured, then one can say that some outcomes are very likely, ceteris paribus, and others not.
There are immense differences in the social sciences both as regards what is to be explained and how it is to be explained. I make an initial distinction between the understanding, construed roughly ...as acquiring a grasp of the generative mechanisms and structures at work in the world, natural and social, and explanation, which I construe as causal. I clarify several candidates for the objects of explanation and reject the idea that the “explanation of behavior”—if that means the acts of concrete situated persons—is ever the proper object of explanation. Critical to my account is the idea of a typical actor, created for purposes of explanation. I conclude by applying this analysis to the explanation of crime.
The book under discussion is James C. Scott's latest contribution to the study of agrarian politics, culture, and society, and to the ways that marginalized communities evade or resist projects of ...state authority. The book offers a synoptic history of Upland Southeast Asia, a 2.5 million-kilometer region of hill country spanning Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, and China. It offers a kind of "area study." It also builds on Scott s earlier work on "hidden transcripts" of subaltern groups and on "seeing like a state." The book raises many important theoretical questions about research methods and social inquiry, the relationship between political science and anthropology, the nature of states, and of modernity more generally. The book is also deeply relevant to problems of "state-building" and "failed states" in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia. As Scott writes, "The huge literature on state-making, contemporary and historic, pays virtually no attention to its obverse: the history of deliberate and reactive statelessness. This is the history of those who got away, and state-making cannot be understood apart from it. This is also what makes it an anarchist history" (p.x). In this symposium, I have invited a number of prominent political and social scientists to comment on the book, its historical narrative, and its broader theoretical implications for thinking about power, state failure, state-building, and foreign policy. How does the book shed light on the limits of states and the modes of resistance to state authority? Are there limits, theoretical and normative, to this "anarchist" understanding of governance and the "art of being governed"?
The institutions of higher education are of fairly recent vintage and came to be what they were for good historical reasons. Then as now, they were part and parcel of the development of the modern ...state and of modern capitalism. These generating conditions have evaporated; the new conditions are now forcing a radical restructuring. In addition then to a restructuring of global capitalism (with attendant consequences for work and workers) and the stunning fiscal crisis of the modern state (which no longer can afford to subsidise higher education), new technologies make available a restructuring which can be legitimated (by employing the rhetoric of access and choice) and is far less expensive. Since I see no forces to prevent this, most post-secondary education in the advanced capitalist societies will be electronically delivered. `Brand name' residential campuses will not disappear but will be highly selective and available only for the few.
