Psychological essentialism is a cognitive bias through which human beings conceive the entities around them as having inner essences and basic natures. Social scientists routinely generate flawed inferences because their methods require the truth of psychological essentialism. This article develops set-theoretic analysis as a scientific-constructivist approach that overcomes the bias of psychological essentialism. With this approach, the “sets” of set-theoretic analysis are mental phenomena that establish boundaries and identify similarities and differences among entities whose natural kind composition is not known. (...) The approach is illustrated through a consideration of research on intelligence, race, and poverty in the United States. (shrink)

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 (...) explain social phenomena such as the rise of capitalism, the decline in oil prices, or the effect of unions on the sports labor market. But how could these explanations possibly work if social entities don’t exist? (shrink)

This article takes up Winch’s exploration of a certain dialectic in philosophical accounts of social inquiry, the poles of which I refer to as the under-laborer and over-laborer conceptions of philosophy. I argue that these conceptions, shown in Risjord and Reed, respectively, are caught in a dialectic of treating philosophy’s roles as either modestly clarifying or broadly determining the claims of social science. A third conception of philosophy, the therapeutic conception, is exemplified by Read et al.’s “New Wittgensteinian” interpretation of (...) Winch’s work as a way out of the dialectic. Discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the latter, I conclude that a stronger development of the therapeutic approach is needed to move past the dialectic. (shrink)

In the production of knowledge about social life, two social contexts come together: the context of investigation, consisting of the social world of the investigator, and the context of explanation, consisting of the social world of the actors who are the subject of study. The nature of, and relationship between, these contexts is imagined in philosophy; managed, rewarded, and sanctioned in graduate seminars, journal reviews, and tenure cases; and practiced in research. Positivism proposed to produce objective knowledge by suppressing the (...) nonlogical and nonobservational aspects of the contexts. Attacks on positivism disputed the effectiveness and rationality of this strategy. Thus " postpositivism " can be understood as a series of attempts to reconstitute the relation between the contexts as the basis for accurate social knowledge. Two of the most important of these attempts—grounded theory and postmodern anthropology—are considered, and a synthesis, which draws from the insights of cultural sociology, is proposed. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article deals with the recent interest shown by critical realists in the study of generative mechanisms in sociology and proposes stronger integration of hermeneutics into this theoretical approach. There are important differences between realism and hermeneutics. While realism strives to overcome the extremes of empiricism and interpretivism with a new version of naturalism, hermeneutics bases its explanations of society on research into meanings. The question is whether underlining these differences is useful for social theory. On the one hand, underestimating (...) hermeneutics makes it difficult for realists to recognize fully the role that processes of understanding play in generating social change. On the other hand, hermeneutical arguments in sociology idealistically identify being with interpreted being. The concept of generative hermeneutics is designed to help to build an alliance between realism and hermeneutics, since one-sided overemphasis on mechanistic logic devaluates the study of social interaction pursued by interpretative sociology. (shrink)

Much of social life now takes place online, and records of online social interactions are available for social science research in the form of massive digital text archives. But cultural social science has contributed little to the development of machine-assisted text analysis methods. As a result few text analysis methods have been developed that link digital text data to theories about culture and discourse. This paper attempts to lay the groundwork for development of such methods by proposing metatheoretical and theoretical (...) foundations suitable for machine-assisted semantic text analysis. Metatheoretically I draw on the work of Elder-Vass, Kaidesoja and others to argue that digital text analysis methods ought to be based on a realist constructionist ontology that treats discourses as ontologically real emergent social entities that have causal relationships with non-discursive social and cognitive processes. Theoretically I follow Feldman and many others in arguing that language is fundamentally shaped by processes of embodied cognition. Researchers developing digital text analysis techniques must theoretically account for such processes if they wish to produce algorithms that can interpret texts in ways that supplement, and not only amplify, human interpretation. I critically survey contemporary text analysis methods that implicitly share these metatheoretical and theoretical positions and discuss some ways these can be further developed with newly available software. (shrink)

How did cultural factors participate in the event of October in Chile? How were these factors related to each other? What implications did they have for collective action and social life? The purpose of the article is to carry out a cultural reading of the October event. To do this, a dialogue is proposed between cultural sociology and cultural studies, applied to the October protest movement, resorting to interpretive research tools. The appropriation of Plaza Italia, in Santiago, by the protesters, (...) is used in an illustrative way to highlight the cultural elements and their interactions. Among the findings, the production of meaning based on motifs and frames stands out, the production of its own symbolism and iconography and the deployment of performances that allow defining the Plaza itself as an artifact of protest. Then certain scopes of the above for civil society are discussed. It concludes with a projection of the work and a brief reflection on the relationship between social sciences and humanities to deploy an interpretive strategy of empirical research. (shrink)

Critical realism is a philosophy of science, which has made significant contributions to epistemic debates within sociology. And yet, its contributions to ethnographic explanation have yet to be fully elaborated. Drawing on ethnographic data on the health-seeking behavior of HIV-infected South Africans, the paper compares and contrasts critical realism with grounded theory, extended case method and the pragmatist method of abduction. In so doing, it argues that critical realism makes a significant contribution to causal explanation in ethnographic research in three (...) ways: 1) by linking structure to agency; 2) by accounting for the contingent, conjunctural nature of causality; and 3) by using surprising empirical findings to generate new theory. The paper develops the AART research schema and illustrates its strengths by employing a Bourdieusian field analysis as a model for morphogenetic explanation. (shrink)

This article suggests an iconic turn in cultural sociology. Icons can be seen, it is argued, as symbolic condensations that root social meanings in material form, allowing the abstractions of cognition and morality to be subsumed, to be made invisible, by aesthetic shape. Meaning is made iconically visible, in other words, by the beautiful, sublime, ugly, or simply by the mundane materiality of everyday life. But it is via the senses that iconic power is made. This new approach to meaning (...) is compared with others — with materialism, semiotics, aestheticism, moralism, realism, and spiritualism. (shrink)

ABSTRACTCritical realism's insight into depth ontology creates the possibility for re-imagining sociology as a science of the social world. However, critical realism has yet to gain a strong foothold in sociological analysis. Challenging the available criticism of critical realism, I argue that its main flaw is its inability to draw an appropriate epistemological strategy from its insights into depth ontology. I propose that this limitation can be overcome when we anchor the depth ontology of critical realism to the two-step epistemological (...) strategies of Bourdieu's field theory: first, objectifying common sense to develop a scientific model of social structure; and second, objectifying the scientific point of view to re-introduce common sense in the scientific model of social structure. I argue that by anchoring the ontological insights of critical realism to the epistemological strategies of field theory, we can create the long-sought core around which sociology can progress as a science of the social world. (shrink)