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  1. A Challenge to Critical Understandings of Race.Robert M. Anthony - 2012 - Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 42 (3):260-282.
    In this article, I demonstrate fundamental weaknesses in the ability of critical understandings of race to produce reliable knowledge of how social actors use social comparisons as a way to align self with ingroup. I trace these weaknesses to two sources: The first is relying on social status as an explanation for race-based assessments, ingroup motivations, and social constructions of otherness. This is opposed to leaning on assessments grounded in social psychological research that links properties of human cognition to 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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  • Explanations of Meaningful Actions.C. Mantzavinos - 2012 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 42 (2):224-238.
    There is a long tradition in philosophy and the social sciences that emphasizes the meaningfulness of human action. This tradition doubts or even negates the possibility of causal explanations of human action precisely on the basis that human actions have meaning. This article provides an argument in favor of methodological naturalism in the social sciences. It grants the main argument of the Interpretivists, that is, that human actions are meaningful, but it shows how a transformation of a "nexus of meaning" (...)
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  • Causal Explanation in the Social Sciences.Daniel Little - 1996 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 34 (S1):31-56.
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  • Nature and the Social Sciences: Examples from the Electricity and Waste Sectors.Mikael Klintman - unknown
    The book has two interrelated objectives. One objective is meta-theoretical and concerns the exploration of theoretical debates connected to issues of studying society and environmental problems; another objective is empirical/analytical, referring to the analysis of "green" public participation in the electricity and waste sectors in Sweden, and partly in the Netherlands as well as the UK. The metatheoretical part draws the conclusion that the ontology of critical realism, combined with a problem-subjectivist tenet, is a particularly fruitful basis for the social (...)
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  • Mechanisms and Functional Hypotheses in Social Science.Daniel Steel - 2005 - Philosophy of Science 72 (5):941-952.
    Critics of functional explanations in social science maintain that such explanations are illegitimate unless a mechanism is specified. Others argue that mechanisms are not necessary for causal inference and that functional explanations are a type of causal claim that raise no special difficulties for testing. I show that there is indeed a special problem that confronts testing functional explanations resulting from their connection to second-order causal claims. I explain how mechanisms can resolve this difficulty, but argue that this does not (...)
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  • Some comments on the inability of sociology of science to explain science.Steven Miller & Marcel Fredericks - 1994 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 20 (1-2):73-86.
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  • Selection and explanation.Alexander Bird - 2007 - In Johannes Persson & Petri Ylikoski (eds.), Rethinking Explanation. Springer. pp. 131--136.
    Selection explanations explain some non-accidental generalizations in virtue of a selection process. Such explanations are not particulaizable - they do not transfer as explanations of the instances of such generalizations. This is unlike many explanations in the physical sciences, where the explanation of the general fact also provides an explanation of its instances (i.e. standard D-N explanations). Are selection explanations (e.g. in biology) therefore a different kind of explanation? I argue that to understand this issue, we need to see that (...)
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  • What Is Philosophy of Social Science?Cathrine Holst - 2009 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 23 (3):313-321.
    Patrick Baert Cambridge, Polity Press, 2005viii + 210 pp., ISBN 9780745622460, £50.00, €62.50 (hardback); ISBN 9780745622477, £17.99, €22.50 (paperback) Hans Dooremalen, Herman de Regt & Maurice Sc...
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  • How Probabilistic Causation Can Account for the Use of Mechanistic Evidence.Erik Weber - 2009 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 23 (3):277-295.
    In a recent article in this journal, Federica Russo and Jon Williamson argue that an analysis of causality in terms of probabilistic relationships does not do justice to the use of mechanistic evidence to support causal claims. I will present Ronald Giere's theory of probabilistic causation, and show that it can account for the use of mechanistic evidence (both in the health sciences—on which Russo and Williamson focus—and elsewhere). I also review some other probabilistic theories of causation (of Suppes, Eells, (...)
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  • A Pragmatist Spin on Analytical Marxism and Methodological Individualism.Chandra Kumar - 2008 - Philosophical Papers 37 (2):185-211.
    The debates of the 1980s and 1990s on methodological individualism versus methodological holism have not been adequately resolved. Within analytical Marxism, G.A. Cohen, John Roemer, Jon Elster and others have come down in favour of methodological individualism as part of the effort to make analytical Marxism more 'scientific' and 'rigorous' than earlier versions of Marxism. In doing so they have presented methodological individualism as a necessary ingredient in ridding Marxism of obscurantism. This view is here challenged from a pragmatist philosophical (...)
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  • Difference mechanisms: Explaining variation with mechanisms.James Tabery - 2009 - Biology and Philosophy 24 (5):645-664.
    Philosophers of science have developed an account of causal-mechanical explanation that captures regularity, but this account neglects variation. In this article I amend the philosophy of mechanisms to capture variation. The task is to explicate the relationship between regular causal mechanisms responsible for individual development and causes of variation responsible for variation in populations. As it turns out, disputes over this relationship have rested at the heart of the nature–nurture debate. Thus, an explication of the relationship between regular causal mechanisms (...)
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  • Norms, normative principles, and explanation: On not getting is from ought.David Henderson - 2002 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 32 (3):329-364.
    It seems that hope springs eternal for the cherished idea that norms (or normativeprinciples) explain actions or regularities in actions. But it also seems thatthere are many ways of going wrong when taking norms and normative principlesas explanatory. The author argues that neither norms nor normative principles—insofar as they are the sort of things with normative force—is explanatoryof what is done. He considers the matter using both erotetic and ontic models ofexplanation. He further considers various understandings of norms. Key Words: (...)
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