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  1. Emergence and Analytical Dualism.Shaun le Boutillier - 2003 - Philosophica 71 (1).
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  • The perils of tweaking: how to use macrodata to set parameters in complex simulation models.Brian Epstein & Patrick Forber - 2013 - Synthese 190 (2):203-218.
    When can macroscopic data about a system be used to set parameters in a microfoundational simulation? We examine the epistemic viability of tweaking parameter values to generate a better fit between the outcome of a simulation and the available observational data. We restrict our focus to microfoundational simulations—those simulations that attempt to replicate the macrobehavior of a target system by modeling interactions between microentities. We argue that tweaking can be effective but that there are two central risks. First, tweaking risks (...)
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  • The Role of Joint Experience in Historical Narratives.Axel Seemann - 2011 - Journal of the Philosophy of History 5 (2):201-229.
    There are historical events which cannot easily be made sense of by reference to the actions of single individuals. I suggest that one way to understand such events is by building on the involved agents' joint experience, or reports thereof. The phenomenology of joint involvement, so my suggestion, is of use in a particular kind of sense making that combines hermeneutical and explanatory elements. Such sense making, I argue, is narrative in character. I suggest a particular conception of historical narratives (...)
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  • Aggregating Causal Judgments.Richard Bradley, Franz Dietrich & Christian List - 2014 - Philosophy of Science 81 (4):491-515.
    Decision-making typically requires judgments about causal relations: we need to know the causal effects of our actions and the causal relevance of various environmental factors. We investigate how several individuals' causal judgments can be aggregated into collective causal judgments. First, we consider the aggregation of causal judgments via the aggregation of probabilistic judgments, and identify the limitations of this approach. We then explore the possibility of aggregating causal judgments independently of probabilistic ones. Formally, we introduce the problem of causal-network aggregation. (...)
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  • Norms and Customs: Causally Important or Causally Impotent?Todd Jones - 2010 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 40 (3):399-432.
    In this article, I argue that norms and customs, despite frequently being described as being causes of behavior in the social sciences and ordinary conversation, cannot really cause behavior. Terms like "norms" and the like seem to refer to philosophically disreputable disjunctive properties. More problematically, even if they do not, or even if there can be disjunctive properties after all, I argue that norms and customs still cannot cause behavior. The social sciences would be better off without referring to properties (...)
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  • Why We Did It: An Anscombian Account of Collective Action.Axel Seemann - 2009 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 17 (5):637-655.
    In this paper, I am concerned with persons' capacity for joint action. I start by suggesting that approaches which seek to account for that capacity in terms of collective intentionality face a problem: there are actions that clearly seem to qualify as collective even though the involved persons cannot be said to entertain an overarching 'We'-intention (however one characterizes this notion). I then go on to develop an alternative account of action that loosely draws on Elizabeth Anscombe's action theory and (...)
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  • Reviews. [REVIEW]Bryce Huebner, Janette Dinishak, James A. Marcum & Jelle De Schrijver - 2008 - Philosophical Psychology 21 (6):843 – 858.
    Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences JON ELSTER Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007484 pages, ISBN: 0521777445 (pbk); $27.99 Explaining Social Be...
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  • The role of fossils in phylogeny reconstruction: Why is it so difficult to integrate paleobiological and neontological evolutionary biology? [REVIEW]Todd Grantham - 2004 - Biology and Philosophy 19 (5):687-720.
    Why has it been so difficult to integrate paleontology and mainstream evolutionary biology? Two common answers are: (1) the two fields have fundamentally different aims, and (2) the tensions arise out of disciplinary squabbles for funding and prestige. This paper examines the role of fossil data in phylogeny reconstruction in order to assess these two explanations. I argue that while cladistics has provided a framework within which to integrate fossil character data, the stratigraphic (temporal) component of fossil data has been (...)
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  • Ontological individualism reconsidered.Brian Epstein - 2009 - Synthese 166 (1):187-213.
    The thesis of methodological individualism in social science is commonly divided into two different claims—explanatory individualism and ontological individualism. Ontological individualism is the thesis that facts about individuals exhaustively determine social facts. Initially taken to be a claim about the identity of groups with sets of individuals or their properties, ontological individualism has more recently been understood as a global supervenience claim. While explanatory individualism has remained controversial, ontological individualism thus understood is almost universally accepted. In this paper I argue (...)
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  • Emergent properties and the context objection to reduction.Megan Delehanty - 2005 - Biology and Philosophy 20 (4):715-734.
    Reductionism is a central issue in the philosophy of biology. One common objection to reduction is that molecular explanation requires reference to higher-level properties, which I refer to as the context objection. I respond to this objection by arguing that a well-articulated notion of a mechanism and what I term mechanism extension enables one to accommodate the context-dependence of biological processes within a reductive explanation. The existence of emergent features in the context could be raised as an objection to the (...)
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  • The Transformative Power of Social Movements.Heydari Fard Sahar - 2023 - Philosophy Compass (1):e12951.
    Social movements possess transformative and progressive power. In this paper, I argue that how this is so, or even if this is so, depends on one's explanatory framework. I consider three such explanatory frameworks for social movements: methodological individualism, collectivism, and complexity theory. In evaluating the various appeals and weaknesses of these frameworks, I show that complexity theory is uniquely poised to capture the complex and dynamic reality of the social world.
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  • A model-based approach to social ontology.Matti Sarkia - 2022 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 52 (3):175-203.
    This paper argues for theoretical modeling and model-construction as central (but not necessarily the only) types of activities that philosophers of social ontology (in the analytic tradition) engage in. This claim is defended through a detailed case study and revisionary interpretation of Raimo Tuomela’s account of the we-perspective. My interpretation is grounded in Ronald Giere’s account of scientific models, and argued to be compatible with, but less demanding than Tuomela’s own description of his account as a philosophical theory of the (...)
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  • Rescuing Ontological Individualism.Francesco Guala - 2022 - Philosophy of Science 89 (3):471-485.
    Standard defenses of ontological individualism are challenged by arguments that exploit the dependence of social facts on material facts—that is, facts that are not about human individuals. In this article, I discuss Brian Epstein’s “materialism” in The Ant Trap: granting Epstein’s strict definition of individualism, I show that his arguments depend crucially on a generous conception of social properties and social facts. Individualists, however, are only committed to the claim that projectible properties are individualistically realized, and materialists have not undermined (...)
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  • The Structure of Complexity and the Limits of Collective Intentionality.Francesco Di Iorio - 2022 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 52 (4):207-234.
    Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Volume 52, Issue 4, Page 207-234, July 2022. According to Searle’s theory of collective intentionality, the fundamental structure of any society can be accounted for in terms of cooperative mechanisms that create deontic relations. This paper criticizes Searle’s standpoint on the ground that, while his social ontology can make sense of simple systems of interaction like symphony orchestras and football teams, the whole coordinative structure of the modern market society cannot be explained solely in terms (...)
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  • The Morality of Social Movements.Sahar Heydari Fard - 2020 - Dissertation, University of Cincinnati
    Understanding a normative concept like oppression requires attention to not only its harms but also the causes of those harms. In other words, a complete understanding of such a concept requires a proper causal explanation. This causal explanation can also inform and constrain our moral response to such harms. Therefore, the conceptual explanatory framework that we use to inform our moral diagnosis and our moral response become significant. The first goal of this dissertation is to propose complexity theory as the (...)
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  • An impossibility result on methodological individualism.Hein Duijf, Allard Tamminga & Frederik Van De Putte - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (12):4165-4185.
    Methodological individualists often claim that any social phenomenon can ultimately be explained in terms of the actions and interactions of individuals. Any Nagelian version of methodological individualism requires that there be bridge laws that translate social statements into individualistic ones. We show that Nagelian individualism can be put to logical scrutiny by making the relevant social and individualistic languages fully explicit and mathematically precise. In particular, we prove that the social statement that a group of (at least two) agents performs (...)
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  • Emergence within social systems.Kenneth Silver - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):7865-7887.
    Emergence is typically discussed in the context of mental properties or the properties of the natural sciences, and accounts of emergence within these contexts tend to look a certain way. The emergent property is taken to emerge instantaneously out of, or to be proximately caused by, complex interaction of colocated entities. Here, however, I focus on the properties instantiated by the elements of certain systems discussed in social ontology, such as being a five-dollar bill or a pawn-movement, and I suggest (...)
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  • We the People: Is the Polity the State?Stephanie Collins & Holly Lawford-Smith - 2021 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 7 (1):78-97.
    When a liberal-democratic state signs a treaty or wages a war, does its whole polity do those things? In this article, we approach this question via the recent social ontological literature on collective agency. We provide arguments that it does and that it does not. The arguments are presented via three considerations: the polity's control over what the state does; the polity's unity; and the influence of individual polity members. We suggest that the answer to our question differs for different (...)
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  • Why the social sciences are irreducible.Tobias Hansson Wahlberg - 2019 - Synthese 196 (12):4961-4987.
    It is often claimed that the social sciences cannot be reduced to a lower-level individualistic science. The standard argument for this position is the Fodorian multiple realizability argument. Its defenders endorse token–token identities between “higher-level” social objects and pluralities/sums of “lower-level” individuals, but they maintain that the properties expressed by social science predicates are often multiply realizable, entailing that type–type identities between social and individualistic properties are ruled out. In this paper I argue that the multiple realizability argument for explanatory (...)
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  • Social Ontology.Brian Epstein - 2018 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Social ontology is the study of the nature and properties of the social world. It is concerned with analyzing the various entities in the world that arise from social interaction. -/- A prominent topic in social ontology is the analysis of social groups. Do social groups exist at all? If so, what sorts of entities are they, and how are they created? Is a social group distinct from the collection of people who are its members, and if so, how is (...)
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  • (1 other version)Levels: Descriptive, Explanatory, and Ontological.Christian List - 2017 - Noûs 53 (4):852-883.
    Scientists and philosophers frequently speak about levels of description, levels of explanation, and ontological levels. In this paper, I propose a unified framework for modelling levels. I give a general definition of a system of levels and show that it can accommodate descriptive, explanatory, and ontological notions of levels. I further illustrate the usefulness of this framework by applying it to some salient philosophical questions: (1) Is there a linear hierarchy of levels, with a fundamental level at the bottom? And (...)
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  • Realism and Antirealism.Randall Harp & Kareem Khalifa - 2016 - In Lee C. McIntyre & Alexander Rosenberg (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Social Science. New York: Routledge. pp. 254-269.
    Our best social scientific theories try to tell us something about the social world. But is talk of a “social world” a metaphor that we ought not take too seriously? In particular, do the denizens of the social world—cultural values like the Protestant work ethic, firms like ExxonMobil, norms like standards of dress and behavior, institutions like the legal system, teams like FC Barcelona, conventions like marriages—exist? The question is not merely academic. Social scientists use these different social entities to (...)
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  • Agency as difference-making: causal foundations of moral responsibility.Johannes Himmelreich - 2015 - Dissertation, London School of Economics and Political Science
    We are responsible for some things but not for others. In this thesis, I investigate what it takes for an entity to be responsible for something. This question has two components: agents and actions. I argue for a permissive view about agents. Entities such as groups or artificially intelligent systems may be agents in the sense required for responsibility. With respect to actions, I argue for a causal view. The relation in virtue of which agents are responsible for actions is (...)
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  • How to define levels of explanation and evaluate their indispensability.Christopher Clarke - 2017 - Synthese 194 (6).
    Some explanations in social science, psychology and biology belong to a higher level than other explanations. And higher explanations possess the virtue of abstracting away from the details of lower explanations, many philosophers argue. As a result, these higher explanations are irreplaceable. And this suggests that there are genuine higher laws or patterns involving social, psychological and biological states. I show that this ‘abstractness argument’ is really an argument schema, not a single argument. This is because the argument uses the (...)
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  • The explanatory virtue of abstracting away from idiosyncratic and messy detail.Christopher Clarke - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (6):1429-1449.
    Some explanations are relatively abstract: they abstract away from the idiosyncratic or messy details of the case in hand. The received wisdom in philosophy is that this is a virtue for any explanation to possess. I argue that the apparent consensus on this point is illusory. When philosophers make this claim, they differ on which of four alternative varieties of abstractness they have in mind. What’s more, for each variety of abstractness there are several alternative reasons to think that the (...)
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  • How Marxism Is Analyzed: An Introduction.Robert Ware - 1989 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 15:1-26.
    What has come to be called ‘analytical Marxism’ is to be celebrated when properly understood. It is a phenomenon that has engaged some of the best people in philosophy, political science, economics, sociology, and other disciplines. In the last fifteen years there has been a blossoming of anaytic studies on Marx and on Marxism in the mainstreams of academic disciplines, with the first impetus coming from philosophers who had been working in the analytic tradition. During the previous sixty years of (...)
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  • Methodological Individualism and Holism in Political Science: A Reconciliation.Christian List & Kai Spiekermann - 2013 - American Political Science Review 107 (4):629-643.
    Political science is divided between methodological individualists, who seek to explain political phenomena by reference to individuals and their interactions, and holists (or nonreductionists), who consider some higher-level social entities or properties such as states, institutions, or cultures ontologically or causally significant. We propose a reconciliation between these two perspectives, building on related work in philosophy. After laying out a taxonomy of different variants of each view, we observe that (i) although political phenomena result from underlying individual attitudes and behavior, (...)
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  • Methodological Individualism and Marxism.Julius Sensat - 1988 - Economics and Philosophy 4 (2):189.
    Recent years have witnessed an increasing number of attempts to reconstruct Marxian theory in forms that can be assessed by reference to currently received standards in various disciplines. The work has even been said to establish a new paradigm: “analytical Marxism.” One doesn't have to endorse this claim to recognize a good deal of merit in the work. Through creative application of state-of-the-art methods to traditional Marxian issues, researchers have promoted productive cross-fertilization with non-Marxian programs and have revealed many problems (...)
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  • The individualism-holism debate on intertheoretic reduction and the argument from multiple realization.Julie Zahle - 2003 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 33 (1):77-99.
    The argument from multiple realization is currently considered the argument against intertheoretic reduction. Both Little and Kincaid have applied the argument to the individualism-holism debate in support of the antireductionist holist position. The author shows that the tenability of the argument, as applied to the individualism-holism debate, hinges on the descriptive constraints imposed on the individualist position. On a plausible formulation of the individualist position, the argument does not establish that the intertheoretic reduction of social theories is highly unlikely. Nonetheless, (...)
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  • The subjective-objective dimension in the individual-society connection: A duality perspective.Tim J. Juckes & John Barresi - 1993 - Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 23 (2):197–216.
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  • Rethinking the Individualism-Holism Debate.Julie Zahle & Finn Collin (eds.) - 2014 - Cham: Springer.
    This collection of papers investigates the most recent debates about individualism and holism in the philosophy of social science. The debates revolve mainly around two issues: firstly, whether social phenomena exist sui generis and how they relate to individuals. This is the focus of discussions between ontological individualists and ontological holists. Secondly, to what extent social scientific explanations may and should, focus on individuals and social phenomena respectively. This issue is debated amongst methodological holists and methodological individualists. -/- In social (...)
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  • The location problem in social ontology.Frank Hindriks - 2013 - Synthese 190 (3):413-437.
    Mental, mathematical, and moral facts are difficult to accommodate within an overall worldview due to the peculiar kinds of properties inherent to them. In this paper I argue that a significant class of social entities also presents us with an ontological puzzle that has thus far not been addressed satisfactorily. This puzzle relates to the location of certain social entities. Where, for instance, are organizations located? Where their members are, or where their designated offices are? Organizations depend on their members (...)
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  • Molecular biology and the unity of science.Harold Kincaid - 1990 - Philosophy of Science 57 (4):575-593.
    Advances in molecular biology have generally been taken to support the claim that biology is reducible to chemistry. I argue against that claim by looking in detail at a number of central results from molecular biology and showing that none of them supports reduction because (1) their basic predicates have multiple realizations, (2) their chemical realization is context-sensitive and (3) their explanations often presuppose biological facts rather than eliminate them. I then consider the heuristic and confirmational implications of irreducibility and (...)
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  • Supervenience and explanation.Harold Kincaid - 1988 - Synthese 77 (November):251-81.
    This paper explores the explanatory adequacy of lower-level theories when their higher-level counterparts are irreducible. If some state or entity described by a high-level theory supervenes upon and is realized in events, entities, etc. described by the relevant lower-level theory, does the latter fully explain the higher-level event even if the higher-level theory is irreducible? While the autonomy of the special sciences and the success of various eliminativist programs depends in large part on how we answer this question, neither the (...)
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  • Eliminativism and methodological individualism.Harold Kincaid - 1990 - Philosophy of Science 57 (1):141-148.
    Tuomela (this issue, pp. 96-103) raises several objections to the analysis and critique of methodological individualism in my (1986). In what follows I reply to those criticisms, arguing, among other things, that: (1) the alleged reductions provided by Tuomela and others fail, because they either presuppose rather than eliminate social predicates or do not avoid the problem of multiple realizations; (2) supervenience does not guarantee that the social sciences are reducible, because merely describing supervenieence bases leaves numerous questions unanswered, and (...)
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  • Joint perception, joint attention, joint know-how.Axel Seemann - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology.
    This paper develops a theory of joint attention as based on, and explicable in terms of, the exercise of a minimal kind of perceptual joint know-how. On the action-based view I shall be developing, joint forms of perception are object-involving processes constituted by perceivers’ skillfully co-ordinated motor movements in social space. Joint experience can then be understood as presenting the process to the involved perceivers and joint attention as perceivers’ focus on the object of this process. This theory reconciles at (...)
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  • (1 other version)Levels: descriptive, explanatory, and ontological.Christian List - 2017
    Scientists and philosophers frequently speak about levels of description, levels of explanation, and ontological levels. This paper presents a framework for studying levels. I give a general definition of a system of levels and discuss several applications, some of which refer to descriptive or explanatory levels while others refer to ontological levels. I illustrate the usefulness of this framework by bringing it to bear on some familiar philosophical questions. Is there a hierarchy of levels, with a fundamental level at the (...)
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  • Reduction in Sociology.William McGinley - 2012 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 42 (3):370-398.
    In grappling with the micro-macro problem in sociology, philosophers of the field are finding it increasingly useful to associate micro-sociology with theory reduction. In this article I argue that the association is ungrounded and undesirable. Although of a reductive "disposition," micro-sociological theories instantiate something more like "reductive explanation," whereby the causal roles of social wholes are explained in terms of their psychological parts. In this form, micro-sociological theories may actually have a better shot at closing the sociology–psychology explanatory gap, and (...)
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  • Methodological individualism and explanation.Raimo Tuomela - 1990 - Philosophy of Science 57 (1):133-140.
    This critical note concerns Harold Kincaid's "Reduction, Explanation and Empiricism" (this journal, December 1986). Kincaid criticizes methodological individualism on several grounds. The present note argues that Kincaid fails at least in his attempt to show that it is false that individualistic theory suffices to fully explain social phenomena. Kincaid's main reason for claiming that individualistic theory is insufficient is that it cannot adequately explain social kinds. The present note contends that an individualist can suitably reinterpret the social talk in question (...)
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  • Methodological Holism in the Social Sciences.Julie Zahle - 2016 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Social Science and the Mental.Alan J. Nelson - 1990 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 15 (1):194-209.
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  • The empirical nature of the individualism-holism dispute.Harold Kincaid - 1993 - Synthese 97 (2):229 - 247.
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  • How Minority Religion Can Shape Corporate Capitalism: An Emergentist Account and Empirical Illustration.Brandon Vaidyanathan - 2020 - Business and Society 59 (5):881-913.
    Theories of how religion shapes business tend to focus on dominant religious institutions. What happens in the case of minority religions, where the alignment of religion with other dominant institutions may be weak at best? To answer this question, I first develop an emergentist account of religion, explaining how macro-level conditioning shapes meso- and micro-level interactions in religious contexts, leading to either structural change or stasis in business contexts. I illustrate this account by examining how Roman Catholicism as a minority (...)
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  • Philosophy without borders, naturally: an interview with Harold Kincaid.Harold Kincaid - 2017 - Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 10 (1):83-100.
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  • Methodological Individualism, Psychological Individualism and the Defense of Reason.Richard Schmitt - 1989 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 15:231-253.
    Jon Elster believes that methodological individualism is self-evident (Elster 1986, 66). Not finding it so, and being suspicious of philosophers who claim that their views are so obvious as to demand no arguments in their favor, I went back to retrace the outlines of the methodological individualism debate. It turns out that the participants to the debate disagree widely as to what they are arguing about; it is not obvious to them what methodological individualism is. The defenders of methodological individualism (...)
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  • World 3 and Methodological Individualism in Popper’s Thought.Francesco Di Iorio - 2016 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 46 (4):352-374.
    Popper’s theory of World 3 is often regarded as incongruent with his defense of methodological individualism. This article criticizes this widespread view. Methodological individualism is said to be at odds with three crucial assumptions of the theory of World 3: the impossibility of reducing World 3 to subjective mental states because it exists objectively, the view that the mental functions cannot be explained by assuming that individuals are isolated atoms, and the idea that World 3 has causal power and influences (...)
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  • Reduction, Supervenience, and the Autonomy of Social Scientific Laws.Lee C. McIntyre - 2000 - Theory and Decision 48 (2):101-122.
    Many have felt that it is impossible to defend autonomous laws of social science: where the regularities upheld are law-like it is argued that they are not at base social scientific, and where the phenomena to be explained would seem to require social descriptions, it is argued that laws governing the phenomena are unavailable at that level. But is it possible to develop an ontology that supports the dependence of the social on the physical, while nonetheless supporting the explanatory power (...)
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  • Individuals, Communities, and Groups in Thomas Kuhn’s Model of Scientific Development.Paulo Pirozelli - 2021 - Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology 25 (1).
    In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn resorts to concepts from several disciplines in order to describe the general patterns of scientific development. This blend of disciplines can be explained in part by Kuhn's intellectual path, from physics to history and then to philosophy of science; but it also points to a deeper methodological problem, which is the question of what is the real unity of analysis in his model of science. The primary intention of this article is, thus, (...)
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  • Coleman’s Boat Revisited: Causal Sequences and the Micro-macro Link.Gustav Ramström - 2018 - Sociological Theory 36 (4):368-391.
    This article argues that empirical social scientists can be freed from having to account for “micro-to-macro transitions.” The article shows, in opposition to the (still) dominant perspective based on Coleman’s macro-micro-macro model, that no micro-macro transitions or mechanisms connect the individual level to the macro level in empirical social science. Rather, when considering that social macro entities and properties are micro manifest rather than macro manifest, it becomes clear that the micro-macro move in empirical social science is purely conceptual or (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Analytical Micro–Macro Relationship in Social Science and Its Implications for the Individualism-Holism Debate.Gustav Ramström - 2018 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 48 (5):474-500.
    This article argues that the tradition within the individualism-holism debate of importing arguments from the micro–macro discussion in other disciplines significantly has hampered our understanding of the “individual-social” relationship. While, for example, the “neural-mental” and “atomic-molecular” links represent empirical “gives rise to” relationships, in the social sciences the micro–macro link is a purely analytical “qualifies as” type of relationship. This disanalogy is important, since it has significant implications for the individualism-holism debate: it implies a phenomenally monist social ontology and it (...)
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