Varieties Of Social Explanation PDF Download
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| Author | : Daniel Little |
| Publisher | : Westview Press |
| Total Pages | : 294 |
| Release | : 1991 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : |
Download Varieties Of Social Explanation Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
Professor Little presents an introduction to the philosophy of social science with an emphasis on the central forms of explanation in social science: rational-intentional, causal, functional, structural, materialist, statistical and interpretive. The book is very strong on recent developments, particularly in its treatment of rational choice theory, microfoundations for social explanation, the idea of supervenience, functionalism, and current discussions of relativism.Of special interest is Professor Little's insight that, like the philosophy of natural science, the philosophy of social science can profit from examining actual scientific examples. Throughout the book, philosophical theory is integrated with recent empirical work on both agrarian and industrial society drawn from political science, sociology, geography, anthropology, and economics.Clearly written and well structured, this text provides the logical and conceptual tools necessary for dealing with the debates at the cutting edge of contemporary philosophy of social science. It will prove indispensible for philosophers, social scientists and their students.
| Author | : Daniel Little |
| Publisher | : Westview Press |
| Total Pages | : 272 |
| Release | : 1990-12-19 |
| Genre | : Philosophy |
| ISBN | : 9780813305660 |
Download Varieties Of Social Explanation Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
Professor Little presents an introduction to the philosophy of social science with an emphasis on the central forms of explanation in social science: rational-intentional, causal, functional, structural, materialist, statistical and interpretive. The book is very strong on recent developments, particularly in its treatment of rational choice theory, microfoundations for social explanation, the idea of supervenience, functionalism, and current discussions of relativism.Of special interest is Professor Little's insight that, like the philosophy of natural science, the philosophy of social science can profit from examining actual scientific examples. Throughout the book, philosophical theory is integrated with recent empirical work on both agrarian and industrial society drawn from political science, sociology, geography, anthropology, and economics.Clearly written and well structured, this text provides the logical and conceptual tools necessary for dealing with the debates at the cutting edge of contemporary philosophy of social science. It will prove indispensible for philosophers, social scientists and their students.
| Author | : John Levi Martin |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press |
| Total Pages | : 400 |
| Release | : 2011-06-01 |
| Genre | : Social Science |
| ISBN | : 0199773440 |
Download The Explanation of Social Action Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
The Explanation of Social Action is a sustained critique of the conventional understanding of what it means to "explain" something in the social sciences. It makes the strong argument that the traditional understanding involves asking questions that have no clear foundation and provoke an unnecessary tension between lay and expert vocabularies. Drawing on the history and philosophy of the social sciences, John Levi Martin exposes the root of the problem as an attempt to counterpose two radically different types of answers to the question of why someone did a certain thing: first person and third person responses. The tendency is epitomized by attempts to explain human action in "causal" terms. This "causality" has little to do with reality and instead involves the creation and validation of abstract statements that almost no social scientist would defend literally. This substitution of analysts' imaginations over actors' realities results from an intellectual history wherein social scientists began to distrust the self-understanding of actors in favor of fundamentally anti-democratic epistemologies. These were rooted most defensibly in a general understanding of an epistemic hiatus in social knowledge and least defensibly in the importation of practices of truth production from the hierarchical setting of institutions for the insane. Martin, instead of assuming that there is something fundamentally arbitrary about the cognitive schemes of actors, focuses on the nature of judgment. This implies the need for a social aesthetics, an understanding of the process whereby actors intuit intersubjectively valid qualities of complex social objects. In this thought-provoking and ambitious book, John Levi Martin argues that the most promising way forward to such a science of social aesthetics will involve a rigorous field theory.
| Author | : Peter T. Manicas |
| Publisher | : Cambridge University Press |
| Total Pages | : 7 |
| Release | : 2006-06-15 |
| Genre | : Social Science |
| ISBN | : 1139457063 |
Download A Realist Philosophy of Social Science Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
This 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.
| Author | : Jason Glynos |
| Publisher | : Routledge |
| Total Pages | : 542 |
| Release | : 2007-09-12 |
| Genre | : Political Science |
| ISBN | : 1134138350 |
Download Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
This book proposes a novel approach to practising social and political analysis based on the role of logics. The authors articulate a distinctive perspective on social science explanation that avoids the problems of scientism and subjectivism by steering a careful course between lawlike explanations and thick descriptions. Drawing upon hermeneutics, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and post-analytical philosophy, this new approach offers a particular set of logics – social, political and fantasmatic – with which to construct critical explanations of practices and regimes. While the first part of the book critically engages with lawlike, interpretivist and causal approaches to critical explanation, the second part elaborates an alternative grammar of concepts informed by an ontological stance rooted in poststructuralist theory. In developing this approach, a number of empirical cases are included to illustrate its basic concepts and logics, ranging from the apartheid regime in South Africa to recent changes in higher education. The book will be a valuable tool for scholars and researchers in a variety of related fields of study in the social sciences, especially the disciplines of political science and political theory, international relations, social theory, cultural studies, anthropology and philosophy.
| Author | : Elena Llaudet |
| Publisher | : Princeton University Press |
| Total Pages | : 256 |
| Release | : 2022-11-29 |
| Genre | : Computers |
| ISBN | : 0691199434 |
Download Data Analysis for Social Science Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
"Data analysis has become a necessary skill across the social sciences, and recent advancements in computing power have made knowledge of programming an essential component. Yet most data science books are intimidating and overwhelming to a non-specialist audience, including most undergraduates. This book will be a shorter, more focused and accessible version of Kosuke Imai's Quantitative Social Science book, which was published by Princeton in 2018 and has been adopted widely in graduate level courses of the same title. This book uses the same innovative approach as Quantitative Social Science , using real data and 'R' to answer a wide range of social science questions. It assumes no prior knowledge of statistics or coding. It starts with straightforward, simple data analysis and culminates with multivariate linear regression models, focusing more on the intuition of how the math works rather than the math itself. The book makes extensive use of data visualizations, diagrams, pictures, cartoons, etc., to help students understand and recall complex concepts, provides an easy to follow, step-by-step template of how to conduct data analysis from beginning to end, and will be accompanied by supplemental materials in the appendix and online for both students and instructors"--
| Author | : Lee C Mcintyre |
| Publisher | : Routledge |
| Total Pages | : 174 |
| Release | : 2018-10-08 |
| Genre | : Social Science |
| ISBN | : 0429978928 |
Download Laws And Explanation In The Social Sciences Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
The first full-length defense of social scientific laws to appear in the last twenty years, this book upholds the prospect of the nomological explanation of human behavior against those who maintain that this approach is impossible, impractical, or irrelevant. By pursuing an analogy with the natural sciences, Mclntyre shows that the barriers to nomological inquiry within the social sciences are not generated by factors unique to social inquiry, but arise from a largely common set of problems that face any scientific endeavor. All of the most widely supported arguments against social scientific laws have failed largely due to adherence to a highly idealized conception of nomologicality (allegedly drawn from the natural sciences themselves) and the limited doctrine of "descriptivism." Basing his arguments upon a more realistic view of scientific theorizing that emphasizes the pivotal role of "redescription" in aiding the search for scientific laws, Mclntyre is optimistic about attaining useful law-like explanations of human behavior.
| Author | : Susan James |
| Publisher | : CUP Archive |
| Total Pages | : 208 |
| Release | : 1984-11-15 |
| Genre | : Health & Fitness |
| ISBN | : 9780521266673 |
Download The Content of Social Explanation Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
This is a study of the central questions of explanation in the social sciences, and a defence of 'holism' against 'individualism'. In the first half of the book Susan James sets out very clearly the philosophical background to this controversy. She locates its source not at the analytical level at which most of the debate is usually conducted but at a more fundamental, moral level, in different conceptions of the human individual. In the second half of the book she examines critically three case studies of holistic approaches - Althusser, Poulantzas and the Annales historians - and progressively refines our sense of the strengths and deficiencies of their programmes. She ends by arguing for a form of concessive holism, which offers some accommodation to liberal conceptions of individual autonomy but continues to emphasise the explanatory importance of social regularities and environments.
| Author | : Robert Brown |
| Publisher | : Routledge |
| Total Pages | : 226 |
| Release | : 2017-07-05 |
| Genre | : Social Science |
| ISBN | : 1351520954 |
Download Explanation and Experience in Social Science Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
According to their critics, social scientists rarely ask the right questions and cannot provide satisfactory answers even to the questions they ask themselves. Social scientists often discuss the nature of knowledge in their fields with a notable lack of clarity. Explanation and Experience in Social Science by Robert Brown dispels the confusion with cogency and wit; it is a systematic, sensible, and lucid analysis of the nature of the explanations put forward by social scientists.Explanation-making is first distinguished from "describing" and "reporting," and then classified into different types, based on different kinds of information used. The greater part of the book consists in discussion and examination of these types of explanation and their relationships, in which the usefulness and limitations of each are assessed. An extraordinary variety of examples from contemporary work in all the social sciences is used, including the fields of sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, demography, political science. and economics. The author makes it clear that good social explanation is possible and that it conforms to the requirements of all good scientific explanation.Explanation and Experience in Social Science is of interest to the practicing scientist--in fact--it is a must-have for any personal or public library with collections in the social sciences. Most studies in the philosophy of the sciences, natural and social, fall into two distinct groups: those written by philosophers for other philosophers and those produced by scientists for their fellow-scientists. The aim of this book is to discuss questions of philosophical interest as they come to be imbedded in the work of social scientists.
| Author | : Guichun Guo |
| Publisher | : World Scientific |
| Total Pages | : 268 |
| Release | : 2014-03-18 |
| Genre | : Science |
| ISBN | : 9814596655 |
Download Scientific Explanation and Methodology of Science Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle
This volume contains the contributed papers of invitees to SEMS 2012 who have also given talks at the conference. The invitees are experts in philosophy of science and technology from Asia (besides China), Australia, Europe, Latin America, North America, as well as from within China. The papers in this volume represent the latest work of each researcher in his or her expertise; and as a result, they give a good representation of the cutting-edge researches in diverse areas in different parts of the world. Contents:The Directedness of Time in Classical Cosmology (Andreas Bartels and Daniel Wohlfarth)Explanation, Special Relativity, and Presentism (Katherine Brading)A Muse of Fire (James Robert Brown)SSK or ESW? — The Bloor-Lynch Debate Revisited (Kai-Yuan Cheng)Model Error and Ensemble Forecasting: A Cautionary Tale (Seamus Bradley, Roman Frigg, Hailiang Du, and Leonard A Smith)The Contextualist Basis of Scientific Explanation (Guichun Guo)On a Bottom-Up Approach to Scientific Discovery (Xiang Huang)The New Ignorance (Janet A Kourany)Models, Fiction, and Fictional Models (Chuang Liu)A Contextualist Interpretation of Mathematics (Jie Liu)Understanding as Integration of Heterogeneous Representations (Sergio F Martínez)Approximation of Laws (Ilkka Niniluoto)Science, Sex, and Pictures: Reflections on van Fraassen's Use of Perspectival Representations (Kathleen Okruhlik)Bayesianism versus Confirmation (Michael Strevens)The Equivalent Transformation Between Non-Truth-Function and Truth-Function (Xiao-Long Wan and Ming-Yi Chen)Mechanism and Productive Event (Zhu Xu)Social Science and the Bayesian Probability Explanation Model (Jie Yin and Lei Zhao)Choice of Units and the Causal Markov Condition (Jiji Zhang and Peter Spirtes) Readership: Graduate science students, professional scientists, and researchers. Keywords:Science Explanation;Scientific Method;Climate Models;Idealization;Relativity Theory;Cosmology
