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"So I continue to believe both things: that statements about social entities and powers must be compatible there being microfoundations for these properties and powers; and that it is theoretically possible that some social structures have properties and powers that are relatively autonomous, in the sense that we can allude to those properties and powers in explanations without being obliged to demonstrate their microfoundations."
"There is an active and extended group of scholars in Europe with a very focused concentration on the philosophy of the social sciences."
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There is a common set of topics and references that bind this extended research community together from Finland to Belgium to the Netherlands to Italy. They share a focus on social explanation. They are intellectually committed to the construct of "causal mechanisms" rather than causal laws. They have affinities and connections to the Analytical Sociology network, though few would explicitly identify themselves as analytical sociologists.
"Social scientists have sketched four distinct theories to explain a phenomenon that appears to have ramped up in recent years, the diffusion of policies across countries. Constructivists trace policy norms to expert epistemic communities and international organizations, who define economic progress and human rights. Coercion theorists point to powerful nation-states, and international financial institutions, that threaten sanctions or promise aid in return for fiscal conservatism, free trade, etc. Competition theorists argue that countries compete to attract investment and to sell exports by lowering the cost of doing business, reducing constraints on investment, or reducing tariff barriers in the hope of reciprocity. Learning theorists suggest that countries learn from their own experiences and, as well, from the policy experiments of their peers. We review the large body of research from sociologists and political scientists, as well as the growing body of work from economists and psychologists, pointing to the diverse mechanisms that are theorized and to promising avenues for distinguishing among causal mechanisms."
"If you’re a psychologist, the news has to make you a little nervous–particularly if you’re a psychologist who published an article in 2008 in any of these three journals: Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, or the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.
Because, if you did, someone is going to check your work. A group of researchers have already begun what they’ve dubbed the Reproducibility Project, which aims to replicate every study from those three journals for that one year. "
"Getting back to ideology, then, Geertz supposed that it was a template for understanding and action at times when existing templates had failed, “where institutionalized guides for behavior, thought, or feeling are weak or absent” (63). It could certainly be negative and pathological, but it might also be inevitable, and, indeed, positive in times of social and political uncertainty."
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Getting back to ideology, then, Geertz supposed that it was a template for understanding and action at times when existing templates had failed, “where institutionalized guides for behavior, thought, or feeling are weak or absent” (63). It could certainly be negative and pathological, but it might also be inevitable, and, indeed, positive in times of social and political uncertainty.
Ideology was definitively not the same as a world-view, because it only arose in situations where stable patterns and “unexamined prejudices” (63) were disrupted. But once these patterns were disrupted, it might be impossible to return to a non-ideological state, except through a long period of adjustment. Thus, in the wake of the French Revolution — “at least up to its time, the greatest incubator of extremist ideologies, ‘progressive and ‘reactionary’ alike” (64) — Edmund Burke’s appeal to “ancient opinions and rules of life” was an ideology, simply because it was no longer an unarticulated assumption. Ideology, then, was a response to “strain”, but the strain was cultural (when the meaning of words and concepts is threatened), at least as much as it was social and psychological.
"Geertz divided diagnostic accounts of ideology into the “interest” theory and the “strain” theory"
"The point here is a fundamental one. The covering law model depends on a metaphysics that gives primacy to laws of nature. The framework of critical realism and its cousins depends on a view of the world as consisting of things and processes with real causal powers. This intellectual framework is applicable to the social world as well as to the natural world. And it provides a strong intellectual basis for postulating and investigating social causal mechanisms. Any conception of causal powers requires that we have an idea of the nature of the substrate of causation in various areas. And the social metaphysics of actor-centered sociology provide a strong candidate for such a framework in the case of social causation."
"Seventy years after Hempel's classic article, the covering law theory is now generally regarded as a fundamentally wrong-headed way of thinking about historical (and social) explanation. Logical positivism is not a convenient lens through which to examine the social and historical sciences. There is too much contingency in the social world. Rather than being the result of law-governed processes, social outcomes proceed from the contingent and historically variable features of the actors who make them. So the attention of many people interested in specifying the nature of historical and social explanation has focused on social mechanisms constituted and driven by common features of agency."
"This might seem like a worthy aspiration. Many social scientists contend that science has a method, and if you want to be scientific, you should adopt it. The method requires you to devise a theoretical model, deduce a testable hypothesis from the model and then test the hypothesis against the world. If the hypothesis is confirmed, the theoretical model holds; if the hypothesis is not confirmed, the theoretical model does not hold. If your discipline does not operate by this method — known as hypothetico-deductivism — then in the minds of many, it’s not scientific."
"In their recently published book A Model Discipline: Political Science and the Logic of Representations (Oxford University Press), Clarke and Primo delve into the ramifications of this "physics envy" for political science. In their quest to emulate the hard sciences, Clarke and Primo write, political scientists have placed far too much emphasis on model testing, resulting in the widespread view "that theoretical models must be tested to be of value and that the ultimate goal of empirical analysis is theory testing."
A Model Discipline argues that the logic behind this stance is hopelessly flawed, while its impacts have been detrimental to political science in a variety of ways."
Here’s the thing: Twitter is part of the “real world.” The Internet is part of the world.
In association with Wellman et al.’s work on the geography of networks, a rich and informative research domain takes shape. With Morning Edition we want a broad reading of Internet scholarship; what we end up with is gotcha reporting on a single study situated in the context of canards and red herrings. Followed, of course, by a reminder to listeners to “follow us on Twitter.”
"Scientists in the field of social psychology must explore what they can do to prevent fraud in the future. Greater transparency with data, including depositing data in repositories where they can be accessed by other scientists (as is done in some other fields), might have sped up detection of this fraud, and it would certainly make researchers more careful about the analyses that they publish."
"Go to any social gathering in your neighborhood and you will notice that people interact mostly with others who are similar in terms of age, gender, race, attributes, and behaviors. This tendency of people to have similar friends—known as homophily—is one of the most pervasive features of social networks (1). A key question is how much of the homophily in behavior can be attributed to social diffusion, that is, direct causal influence of one person on another through social ties (2, 3). Results from two clever Internet experiments reported by Centola last year (4) and on page 1269 of this issue (5) shed light on how the particular arrangement of social ties promotes social diffusion."
"In See-through Science, James Wilsdon and Rebecca Willis argue that we are on the cusp of a new phase in debates over science and society. Public engagement is about to move upstream.
Scientists need to find ways of listening to and valuing more diverse forms of public knowledge and social intelligence. Only by opening up innovation processes at an early stage can we ensure that science contributes to the common good.
Debates about risk are important. But the public also want answers to the more fundamental questions at stake in any new technology: Who owns it? Who benefits from it? To what purposes will it be directed?"
"In many ways, science has never had it so good. Research budgets are as high as they’ve ever been and are still rising. And science and innovation are core themes of Labour’s third term agenda. But the relationship between science and wider society still needs work. Fewer people are becoming scientists, university departments are closing and there is lingering public unease about the way that science is governed.
This pamphlet argues that we need to find new ways of talking about and building ‘the public value of science’. Britain’s hope of becoming the best place in the world to do science rests as much on giving scientists the freedom and incentive to renew their institutions and practices, as it does on 10-year frameworks and R&D targets."
"We know that experts can no longer rely upon public deference, but the problem goes deeper than trust. Rebuilding expert advice for the 21st century means looking at what counts as knowledge. Opening-up needs to mean more than showing people how expert advice works. Opening-up needs to mean open-mindedness, it needs to mean asking new questions and it needs to mean listening to a much wider range of perspectives.
Expertise is about more than evidence. It is also about judgement and wisdom. Our argument is not that we should reject the received wisdom in favour of the wisdom of crowds. But we need to go beyond a simple model of ‘evidence-based policy.’ Drawing on recent case studies and research with ‘lay members’ of expert committees, this pamphlet looks to a new model of expertise which is more diverse, takes better account of uncertainty, is aware of its context and trusts the public."
"It is clear that scientists simply saying that they know best is not enough for social or political action - take vaccines, climate change, nutrition, drugs policy (pharmaceutical or otherwise), energy, badger culling, or even - to be retro for a moment - mad cow disease, for example. To have impact, the public must believe the science, not just have it delivered to them. Belief is a social process, and this is where experts on the social can have a powerful role to play."
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