Academia is a competitive environment. Early Career Researchers (ECRs) are limited in experience and resources and especially need achievements to secure and expand their careers. To help with these issues, this book offers a new approach for conducting research using the combination of mindsponge innovative thinking and Bayesian analytics. This is not just another analytics book. 1. A new perspective on psychological processes: Mindsponge is a novel approach for examining the human mind’s information processing mechanism. This conceptual framework is used (...) to construct models in studies. The framework is highly flexible and widely applicable for many different types of information processes. The mindsponge approach can help researchers discover interesting ideas or even formulate their very own theories when investigating psychosocial phenomena. This approach brings a fresh wind to the current landscape of social sciences and humanities (SSH). 2. Easy-to-follow analysis protocol: The Bayesian Mindsponge Framework (BMF analytics) is useful in terms of computing and visualizing power but also easy to learn and apply. Contrary to being intimidating, the Bayesian analytics section of this book is presented in a reader-friendly manner with a detailed yet clear step-by-step procedure. Examples are from published BMF articles, allowing readers to immediately practice the method and quickly create their own applications. With educational purposes in mind, the book is very suitable for ECRs who are looking to innovate their research methods. 3. Advocating for low-cost, high-quality research: Doing science can be very costly. Mindsponge innovative thinking and BMF analytics help produce impactful studies using openly available data on online repositories. This is based on the authors’ previous works and experiences. The book presents examples of employing the open R package bayesvl on secondary data from different sources. With less financial constraints, researchers can have more freedom of thought to pursue their curiosity and creativity. ECRs in low- and middle-income countries may find this aspect crucial in their careers. 4. Support and collaboration: The authors share their insights from experiences in the academic publishing system to help readers get through the processes of manuscript writing and peer-reviewing more easily. The authors are also ready to support other researchers with further inquiries and collaboration opportunities at the following website, mindsponge(dot)info. This book is for: a) ECRs whose only abundant resources are their innovation capacity and strength of will; b) Researchers in SSH who want to explore a novel approach to thinking and study conducting; c) Low- and middle-income countries’ researchers looking for a cost-effective research protocol; and, d) Innovative thinkers who want to turn their interesting thoughts into good publications. (shrink)

Cognitive science, is the science of the mind and examines cognition, in all its scope, as a mental-brain process. Cognitive social sciences are resulted from the encounter, interaction and integration of social and cognitive sciences, and are hoped to deepen our understandings and explanations of the social phenomena. This paper will discuss four views about what this integration is and how it takes place, namely explanatory grounding, theoretical unification, constraints, and complementarity. some people have preferred (...) explanatory grounding and constraints approach, and maintain that based on these approaches, social cognitive science will have a better and a clearer perspective. In spite of them, I prefer a complementarity approach, Based on which, cognitive social science can be seen as an extension and improvement of social science and cognitive science, not a product of an interdisciplinary approach, This preferred approach considers the subject of cognitive social science as a socio-cognitive issue. (shrink)

Developing research groups within universities and science-technology institutions is one topic that gained a special interest in recent times. In this article, we will present our experience of building a research team in the field of Social Science at EdLab Asia Educational Research and Development Centre (EdLab Asia), a young research institute which achieved several initial results after one year of establishment: 14 published works in the journals from Clarivate WOS and Scopus list, between the time from (...) Sept 2019 to Sept 2020. This article will present the goals, strategies, structure, and operating principles of EdLab Asia. Policy implications for universities and science-technology institutions in educational science in particular, and social science in general will be mentioned at the end of this article. (shrink)

The growth of knowledge has always included opposing worldviews and clashes of distinct interests. This includes different rationalities which either have served or disserved the State. A Copernican world defied the Catholic Church. Cartesian philosophy and Newtonian physics incited a major split between an allegedly knowing subject and external realities. As an outcome, many dualisms emerged: subjectivity/objectivity, particular/universal, etc. Hegelian dialectics elaborated such approach to its most extreme. The pretension of social science to be value-free assumed a neutral (...) observer collating external facts. Yet both Hume and Adam Smith challenged Descartes cogito as banal, stressing that it is not because we think that we are but rather than how we think is who we have become through the values, dispositions and beliefs that we have consciously or less than consciously acquired from life experience, and that no perception is neutral. Hume anticipated Bourclieu both on habItus and also on reflexivity in his concept of the reflexive mind" yet this then was lost by the presumption, such as by Bertrand Russell, that Hume was a "mere empiricist". Logical positivism then claimed that an appeal to 'facts' could dismiss metaphysics, invoking the logical atomism of Russell and the early Wittgenstein. But which Wittgenstein transcended not in the sense of transcendental metaphysics, though he was deeply influenced by Schopenhauer, but - after a road to Damascus encounter with Sraffa - coming to realise that meanings depend on context and that their context needs to be understood. Which we suggest in this paper is that these issues are highly relevant to the troubled relationship between rationality - or rationalities - and the State. (shrink)

Given the reproducibility crisis (or replication crisis), more psychologists and social-cultural scientists are getting involved with Bayesian inference. Therefore, the current article provides a brief overview of programs (or software) and steps to conduct Bayesian data analysis in social sciences.

The Philosophy of Social Science: A Contemporary Introduction examines the perennial questions of philosophy by engaging with the empirical study of society. The book offers a comprehensive overview of debates in the field, with special attention to questions arising from new research programs in the social sciences. The text uses detailed examples of social scientific research to motivate and illustrate the philosophical discussion. Topics include the relationship of social policy to social science, interpretive (...) research, action explanation, game theory, social scientific accounts of norms, joint intentionality, reductionism, causal modeling, case study research, and experimentation. (shrink)

Background: Academic productivity has been studied by scholars all round the world for many years. However, in Vietnam, this topic has scarcely been addressed. This research therefore aims at better understanding the correlations between gender, age, research experience, the leading role of corresponding authors, and the total number of their publications in the specific realm of social sciences and humanities. Methods: The study employed a Scopus dataset with publication profiles of 410 Vietnamese researchers between 2008 and 2017. Results: Men (...) did not differ from women in academic publications (P=0.827). The proficiency of corresponding authors positively correlated with the number of published papers (rs=0.61, P<0.001). Lastly, the age of lead authors strongly correlated with scientific output (rs=0.74, P<0.001 for authors between 40 and 50 years of age). Conclusion: While scientific output correlated with the author ages and number of articles in which they led, it was not correlated with their gender in Vietnamese social science and humanities authors. (shrink)

The persistence of “stargazing,” p-hacking and HARKing4 are among the main causes for the severity of the irreproducibility problem in social sciences.

Vietnam’s Higher Education Reform Agenda 2006-2020 made the promotion of research a critical priority for the country. This emphasis was underlined again in a later master plan, the Science and Technology Development Strategy 2011-2020.

ABSTRACT Social sciences are sciences that explain the society and its components (individuals and social institutions).The objective of this is to examine social sciences by highlighting key justifications for their existence and making suggestions on how they can be made better in institutions like IUIU. The paper was a result of a review of secondary sources and writings on social sciences by famous scholars and scientists and also a compilation of experiences accumulated over time as an (...) instructor in social sciences, which all were put into the perspective of IUIU. The study showed that social sciences in institutions like IUIU can be made better to make them responsive to societal problems. The increasing reliance of social sciences in providing practical solutions to the too many problems the world today poses critical questions to the disciplines of social sciences and therefore demands pertinent answers on how these will be resolved. One can however note that Social Sciences in some of their disciplines, in the way they are practiced, in the topics of research tackled, and in the solutions put forward, are a direct result of the complex society. In conclusion therefore, Institutions should also borrow from such problems to trim their structures, disciplines and related programs in that same way. IUIU should not be exceptional. (shrink)

The social sciences face a problem of sample non-representation, where the majority of samples consist of undergraduate students from Euro-American institutions. The problem has been identified for decades with little trend of improvement. In this paper, I trace the history of sampling theory. The dominant framework, called the design-based approach, takes random sampling as the gold standard. The idea is that a sampling procedure that is maximally uninformative prevents samplers from introducing arbitrary bias, thus preserving sample representation. I show (...) how this framework, while good in theory, faces many challenges in application. Instead, I advocate for an alternative framework, called the model-based approach to sampling, where representative samples are those balanced in composition, however they were drawn. I argue that the model-based framework is more appropriate in the social sciences because it allows for systematic assessment of imperfect samples and methodical improvement in resource-limited scientific contexts. I end with practical proposals of improving sample quality in the social sciences. (shrink)

The central aim of this thesis is to confront the world-view of positivistic materialism with its nihilistic implications and to develop an alternative world-view based on process philosophy, showing how in terms of this, science and ethics can be reconciled. The thesis begins with an account of the rise of positivism and materialism, or ‘scientism’, to its dominant position in the culture of Western civilization and shows what effect this has had on the image of man and consequently on (...) ethical views. After having shown the basic weaknesses of this world-view, the positivist account of science is criticised and an alternative epistemology is developed in which the aim of disciplined inquiry is seen to be understanding. It is argued on the basis of this epistemology that science and metaphysics are indissociable, and that the materialist conception of being is open to challenge from a different ontology. Having reviewed the various conceptions of being which have been developed in the past, a version of process philosophy is outlined and it is argued that this promises to be far more effective than materialism as a foundation for the natural sciences. In particular it is shown how in terms of process philosophy it is possible to conceive of living, sentient organisms as having emerged from inanimate being. This provides the basis for the development of a conception of humanity as an emergent form of life. The human order is then seen as a process of becoming within nature with its own unique dynamics, irreducible to any other processes, involving both intentional and unintentional processes. It is shown how on the basis of this conception of humanity it is possible to develop an ethical theory and a critical social science, and in this way, to transcend the disjunction between science and ethics. -/- . (shrink)

Deception of subjects is used frequently in the social sciences. Examples are provided. The ethics of experimental deception are discussed, in particular various maneuvers to solve the problem. The results have implications for the use of deception in the biomedical sciences.

A traditional social scientific divide concerns the centrality of the interpretation of local understandings as opposed to attending to relatively general factors in understanding human individual and group differences. We consider one of the most common social scientific variables, race, and ask how to conceive of its causal power. We suggest that any plausible attempt to model the causal effects of such constructed social roles will involve close interplay between interpretationist and more general elements. Thus, we offer (...) a case study that one cannot offer a comprehensive model of the causal power of racial categories as social constructions without careful attention both to local meanings and more general mechanisms. (shrink)

The term – “đi tắt, đón đầu,” whose translation is “to gain a head start by taking a shortcut,” has been regularly mentioned by Vietnamese policymakers in the recent years as a means to successfully adopt the Industrial Revolution 4.0. Being inspired by the term and my recent contribution to a book, I argue that Vietnamese Social Sciences is also be able “to gain a head start by taking a shortcut" by adopting open movement and promoting interdisciplinary research.

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 52, Issue 1, Page 5-41, Winter 2024.

Community detection is a major issue in network analysis. This paper combines a socio-historical approach with an experimental reconstruction of programs to investigate the early automation of clique detection algorithms, which remains one of the unsolved NP-complete problems today. The research led by the archaeologist Jean-Claude Gardin from the 1950s on non-numerical information and graph analysis is retraced to demonstrate the early contributions of social sciences and humanities. The limited recognition and reception of Gardin's innovative computer application to the (...) humanities are addressed through two factors, in addition to the effects of historiography and bibliographies on the recording, discoverability, and reuse of scientific productions: (1) funding policies, evidenced by the transfer of research effort on graph applications from temporary interdisciplinary spaces to disciplinary organizations related to the then-emerging field of computer science; and (2) the erratic careers of algorithms, in which efficiency, flaws, corrections, and authors’ status, were determining factors. (shrink)

Although the idea of the Anthropocene originated in the earth sciences, there have been increasing calls for questions about the Anthropocene to be addressed by pan-disciplinary groups of researchers from across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. We use data analysis techniques from corpus linguistics to examine academic texts about the Anthropocene from these disciplinary families. We read the data to suggest that barriers to a broadly interdisciplinary study of the Anthropocene are high, but we are also able (...) to identify some areas of common ground that could serve as interdisciplinary bridges. (shrink)

Searle claims that his theory of institutional reality is particularly suitable as a theoretical scheme of individuation for work in the social sciences. We argue that this is not the case. The first problem with regulatory individuation is due to the familiar fact that institutional judgments have constrained revisability criteria. The second problem with regulatory individuation is due to the fact that institutions amend their declarative judgments based on the inferential (syntactic) properties of the judgments and in response to (...) regulatory pressure, and not based on descriptive (semantic) properties and in response to matters of descriptive adequacy. These two problems imply that ‘regulatory kinds' (countries, borders, kings) will almost inevitably be disjunctive kinds that are ill-suited for scientific theorizing. This also explains why the law often makes odd pronouncements, e.g. calling ketchup a vegetable, considering an arm bent fifteen degrees to be straight, and not admitting that Somaliland is a country. (shrink)

Nowadays, protecting trust in social sciences also means engaging in open community dialogue, which helps to safeguard robustness and improve efficiency of research methods. The combination of open data, open review and open dialogue may sound simple but implementation in the real world will not be straightforward. However, in view of Begley and Ellis’s (2012) statement that, “the scientific process demands the highest standards of quality, ethics and rigour,” they are worth implementing. More importantly, they are feasible to work (...) on and likely will help to restore plausibility to social sciences research. Therefore, I feel it likely that the triplet of open data, open review and open dialogue will gradually emerge to become policy requirements regardless of the research funding source. (shrink)

In this short essay, I describe how our Vietnam-based continuing education program, Research Coach in Social Sciences (RCISS), supports early-career researchers to (co)publish their first international indexed publications (i.e., publications in Clarivate Web of Science [WoS] or Sco- pus-indexed journals). In developed countries, junior researchers often seek help from univer- sity professors to publish their first publication. However, given the chronic shortage of senior social sciences scholars with international publishing experience in Vietnam, along with out- dated and (...) ill-designed PhD programs, early-career researchers in the social sciences in Viet- nam often face challenges in international publishing. (shrink)

Vinten looks at the relationship between Wittgenstein’s philosophy and the social sciences as well as at the ideological implications of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and applications of Wittgenstein’s philosophy to problems in social science. He examines and assesses the work of thinkers like Richard Rorty, Perry Anderson, and Chantal Mouffe. -/- “Robert Vinten has produced an impressively meticulous and wide-ranging discussion of how Wittgenstein’s mature philosophy can revitalize the social sciences. There is insight and scholarship on every page. (...) This important book will open up new possibilities for both philosophers and social scientists.” —Leonidas Tsilipakos, Lecturer, University of Bristol, UK. (shrink)

This article introduces a strategic decision-game theoretic approach, the Pardoner’s Dilemma, and juxtaposes it with the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Game theory has emerged as a significant approach in the twentieth century for explaining strategic decision-making in numerous arenas, including economics, business, politics, ethics, international relations, biology, law, and war studies. ‘Game theory’ explains how and why players/actors/agents cooperate or conflict to procure their self-interests in a social world. Life is a game, and human, corporate, and artificial intelligent agents are players (...) who play different games to maximise utility or minimise disutility. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a promising game-theoretic approach that explains strategic decision-making in zero-sum and non-zero-sum games. ‘Strategic decision-making’ means that the outcome does not depend upon the actions of a player but upon all players. There are numerous essential game strategies, including tossing, negotiation, bargaining, balloting, competition, chance, power, and arbitration. Although the Prisoner’s Dilemma is a good game-theoretic approach, it does not allow players to use the key game strategies. In contrast, Pardoner’s Dilemma is a game theoretic approach that not only explains zero-sum and non-zero-sum games but also allows the players to use different game strategies, such as negotiation, bargaining, tossing, chance, balloting, competition, arbitration, and power. The article develops and defends the Pardoner’s Dilemma in the game-theoretic approach as an alternative to the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The article claims that the Pardoner’s Dilemma is a more promising approach than the Prisoner’s Dilemma in the decision-game theoretic framework. By introducing the Pardoner’s Dilemma, the article enhances the scope of decision/game theory in social sciences. (shrink)

Comparing different causes’ importance, and apportioning responsibility between them, requires making good sense of the notion of partial explanation, that is, of degree of explanation. How much is this subjective, how much objective? If the causes in question are probabilistic, how much is the outcome due to them and how much to simple chance? I formulate the notion of degree of causation, or effect size, relating it to influential recent work in the literature on causation. I examine to what extent (...) mainstream social science methods--both quantitative and qualitative--succeed in establishing effect sizes so understood. The answer turns out to be, roughly: only to some extent. Next, the standard understanding of effect size, even though widespread, still has several underappreciated consequences. I detail some of those. Finally, I discuss the separate issue of explanandum-dependence, which is essential to assessing any cause’s explanatory importance and yet which has been comparatively neglected. (shrink)

This article makes three claims concerning the concept of contingency. First, we argue that the word contingency is used in far too many ways to be useful. Its many meanings are detrimental to clarity of discussion and thought in history and the social sciences. We show how there are eight distinct uses of the word and illustrate this with numerous examples from the social sciences and history, highlighting the scope for confusion caused by the many, often contradictory uses (...) of the term. Second, we impose some order on these uses through developing a threefold classification of contingency based on assumptions about possible worlds and determinism. Finally, we discuss why we believe that one of the classes is a special use of the word without relevance to the social sciences, while the two remaining classes are nothing more than a variety of the “no hidden factors” argument in the debate on indeterminism and determinism. (shrink)

We live in a world of crowds and corporations, artworks and artifacts, legislatures and languages, money and markets. These are all social objects — they are made, at least in part, by people and by communities. But what exactly are these things? How are they made, and what is the role of people in making them? In The Ant Trap, Brian Epstein rewrites our understanding of the nature of the social world and the foundations of the social (...) sciences. Epstein explains and challenges the three prevailing traditions about how the social world is made. One tradition takes the social world to be built out of people, much as traffic is built out of cars. A second tradition also takes people to be the building blocks of the social world, but focuses on thoughts and attitudes we have toward one another. And a third tradition takes the social world to be a collective projection onto the physical world. Epstein shows that these share critical flaws. Most fundamentally, all three traditions overestimate the role of people in building the social world: they are overly anthropocentric. Epstein starts from scratch, bringing the resources of contemporary metaphysics to bear. In the place of traditional theories, he introduces a model based on a new distinction between the grounds and the anchors of social facts. Epstein illustrates the model with a study of the nature of law, and shows how to interpret the prevailing traditions about the social world. Then he turns to social groups, and to what it means for a group to take an action or have an intention. Contrary to the overwhelming consensus, these often depend on more than the actions and intentions of group members. (shrink)

The application of statistical methods and models both in the natural and social sciences is nowadays a trivial fact which nobody would deny. Bold analogies even suggest the application of the same statistical models to fields as different as statistical mechanics and economics, among them the case of the young and controversial discipline of Econophysics . Less trivial, however, is the answer to the philosophical question, which has been raised ever since the possibility of “commuting” statistical thinking and models (...) between natural and social sciences emerged: whether such a methodological kinship would imply some kind of more profound unity of the natural and the social domain. Starting with Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1874) and ending with the Vienna Circle (from the late 1920s until the 1940s), this paper offers a brief historical and philosophical reconstruction of some important stages in the development of statistics as “commuting” between the natural and the social sciences. This reconstruction is meant to highlight (with respect to the authors under consideration): (1) the existence of a significant correlation between the readiness to “transfer” statistical thinking from natural to social sciences and vice versa, on the one hand, and the standpoints on the issue of the unity/disunity of science, on the other; (2) the historical roots and the fortunes of the analogy between statistical models of society and statistical models of gases. (shrink)

This paper draws some bold conclusions from modest premises. My topic is an old one, the Neohumean view of practical rationality. First, I show that this view consists of two independent claims, instrumentalism and subjectivism. Most critics run these together. Instrumentalism is entailed by many theories beyond Neohumeanism, viz. by any theory that says rational actions maximize something. Second, I give a new argument against instrumentalism, using simple counterexamples. This argument systematically undermines consequentialism and rational choice theory, I show, using (...) detailed examples of their many social science applications. There is no obvious fix. (shrink)

This research explores the incorporation of narrative perspectives in economics as a social science and its implications for rethinking epistemology. By examining the role of narratives in economic analysis, the study highlights the advantages of narratives in providing contextualized accounts of human experiences, connecting economic concepts to real-world phenomena, and exploring diverse perspectives. It emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration between philosophers, economists, and social scientists to gain a comprehensive understanding of narratives' influence on economic decision-making, market (...) dynamics, and consumer behaviour. The research suggests that narratives offer a means to challenge the notion of a single, objective truth and contribute to a more inclusive and robust framework for analyzing economic phenomena. The implications extend beyond economics, urging a broader perspective on epistemology by embracing narrative perspectives and engaging in interdisciplinary collaboration across disciplines. Overall, this research calls for a rethinking of epistemology, recognising the significance of narratives and their role in knowledge production. (shrink)

I motivate the concept of styles of scientific investigation, and differentiate two styles, formal and compositional. Styles are ways of doing scientific research. Radically different styles exist. I explore the possibility of the unification of biology and social science, as well as the possibility of unifying the two styles I identify. Recent attempts at unifying biology and social science have been premised almost exclusively on the formal style. Through the use of a historical example of defenders (...) of compositional biological social science, the Ecology Group at the University of Chicago from, roughly, the 1930s to the 1950s, I attempt to show the coherence and possibility, if not utility, of employing the compositional style to effect the synthesis of biology and social science. I also relate the efforts of the Ecology Group to those of investigators in the Sociology Department of the University of Chicago. In my conclusion, I discuss the usefulness both of employing the category of styles of scientific investigation in historical and philosophical studies of science, as well as the concept of compositionality in scientific studies. I end the paper with some tentative suggestions regarding the importance of compositionality for an analysis of human society. (shrink)

A response to a declaration in 'Le Monde', 'Luttons efficacement contre les théories du complot' by Gérald Bronner, Véronique Campion-Vincent, Sylvain Delouvée, Sebastian Dieguez, Karen Douglas, Nicolas Gauvrit, Anthony Lantian, and Pascal Wagner-Egger, published on June the 6th, 2016.

The debates on the scientificity of social sciences in general, and sociology in particular, are recurring. From the original methodenstreitat the end the 19th Century to the contemporary controversy on the legitimacy of “regional epistemologies”, a same set of interrogations reappears. Are social sciences really scientific? And if so, are they sciences like other sciences? How should we conceive “research programs” Lakatos (1978) or “research traditions” for Laudan (1977) able to produce advancement of knowledge in the field of (...) social and human phenomena? Is the progress of knowledge in social sciences similar to the one generally observed in natural sciences? Is it possible to evaluate the relative merits of each one of these research programs? -/- These debates are important vectors of social and intellectual polarization. The historical divide between the positivist and the hermeneutics poles precedes the structure of the contemporary debate around the epistemic space of social sciences, It is not only a question of renewing the opposition between a monist view of sciences (e.g. McIntyre, 1996) and a dualistic one (e.g. Geertz, 1973) or even a trialist view of sciences (e.g. Lepenies, 1985). It is also a question of asserting dichotomies transformed into framework (including when it is a question of exceeding them): nature-culture, nomothetic-idiographic, models-narrative, structure-history, cause-reason, explanation-comprehension. -/- In this short introduction, we provide, in section 2, a first overview of this epistemological debate in social science. Section 3 proposes a different standpoint on the same questions, by introducing both ontological and methodological aspects in this basic epistemological debate. Namely, following (Hollis, 1994) oppositions of the explanation - understanding, causes - meaning, etc., types discussed in the firsts ection are comparatively examined together with oppositions of the structure - action, holism - individualism types. This allows us to discus show multi-agent design, by integrating various dimensions and standpoints in the same framework (Phan, Amblard, 2007, Chapters 1, 5, 14) can help us to shift these boundaries, and to bypass these oppositions. As model building and ontology design are at the core of this process (Phan, Amblard, 2007, Chapter 12), Section4 discusses various issues of the art of modelling, starting both from economists’ and sociologists’ current standpoints. (shrink)

These essays reveal another side of Horkheimer, focusing on his remarkable contributions to critical theory in the 1930s. Max Horkheimer is well known as the director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and as a sometime collaborator with Theodor Adorno, especially on their classic Dialectic of Enlightenment. These essays reveal another side of Horkheimer, focusing on his remarkable contributions to critical theory in the 1930s. Included are Horkheimer's inaugural address as director of the Institute, in which he outlines (...) the interdisciplinary research program that would dominate the initial phase of the Frankfurt School, his first full monograph, and a number of other pieces published in the 1930s. The essays, most of which have not appeared in English before, are surprisingly relevant to current post-philosophy debates, notably "On the Problem of Truth," with its focus on pragmatism, and "The Rationalism Debate in Current Philosophy," a sustained critique of the post-Cartesian philosophy of consciousness. Horkheimer's 1933 critique of Kantian ethics, "Materialism and Morality," is of particular interest given the current reaction to the neo-Kantian aspect of Habermas's work. There are also essays relevant to the current foundations debate within Continental philosophy, and the rationality/relativism question is sustained throughout the volume. (shrink)

Evidential Pluralism maintains that in order to establish a causal claim one normally needs to establish the existence of an appropriate conditional correlation and the existence of an appropriate mechanism complex, so when assessing a causal claim one ought to consider both association studies and mechanistic studies. Hitherto, Evidential Pluralism has been applied to medicine, leading to the EBM+ programme, which recommends that evidence-based medicine should systematically evaluate mechanistic studies alongside clinical studies. This paper argues that Evidential Pluralism can also (...) be fruitfully applied to the social sciences. In particular, Evidential Pluralism provides (i) a new approach to evidence-based policy; (ii) an account of the evidential relationships in more theoretical research; and (iii) new philosophical motivation for mixed methods research. The application of Evidential Pluralism to the social sciences is also defended against two objections. (shrink)

This study provides a basic introduction to agent-based modeling (ABM) as a powerful blend of classical and constructive mathematics, with a primary focus on its applicability for social science research. The typical goals of ABM social science researchers are discussed along with the culture-dish nature of their computer experiments. The applicability of ABM for science more generally is also considered, with special attention to physics. Finally, two distinct types of ABM applications are summarized in order (...) to illustrate concretely the duality of ABM: Real-world systems can not only be simulated with verisimilitude using ABM; they can also be efficiently and robustly designed and constructed on the basis of ABM principles. (shrink)

Several recent publications attest to a renewed interest, at the dawn of the 21st century, in the philosophy of Charles S. Peirce. While agreeing with the relevance of Peirce philosophy for the 21st century, we disagree with some interpretations of Peirce as a utilitarian-based pragmatist, or with attempts to extract from Peirce a theory of social justice for 21st century societies. A critical exploration of Peirce’s philosophy of science, particularly his idea of scientific inquiry as “the study of (...) useless things”, serves to illuminate the un-pragmatic and anti-utilitarian dimension of Peirce’s thought, as well as to reveal his true ethical relevance for the 21st century. (shrink)

Readers of Philosophical Psychology may be most familiar with Ron Sun by way of an article recently appearing in this journal on creative composition expressed within his own hybrid computational intelligence model, CLARION (Sun, 2013). That article represents nearly two decades’ work in situated agency stressing the importance of psychologically realistic architectures and processes in the articulation of both functional, and reflectively informative, AI and agent- level social-cultural simulations. Readers may be less familiar with Sun’s 2001 “prolegomena” to related (...) multi-agent (proto-social) research also from this journal. That article argues that “a proper balance between “objective” social reality and individual cognitive processes” is necessary in order to understand “how individual belief systems... and the social/cultural belief system ... interact” (Sun, 2001, pages 10 and 23). This issue remains central in Sun’s 2012 edited volume, Grounding Social Sciences in the Cognitive Sciences, here addressed from within the expanding field of pioneering researchers bent on orchestrating that proper balance, the “cognitive social sciences.” Its fifteen chapters are sectioned according to culture, politics, religion, and economics, and closes with an especially rewarding pair of contributions from Gintis, and McCubbins and Turner, under the heading of “unifying perspectives.” Most entries – but for Sun’s own - are serviceably summarized in the introductory overview. So, rather than follow suit, this review will focus on setting out Sun’s vision, noting how this text helps us to realize it more clearly, with a positive focus on a few entries in particular. (shrink)

Since its emergence in the 1960s, Artifcial Intelligence (AI) has grown to conquer many technology products and their felds of application. Machine learning, as a major part of the current AI solutions, can learn from the data and through experience to reach high performance on various tasks. This growing success of AI algorithms has led to a need for interpretability to understand opaque models such as deep neural networks. Various requirements have been raised from diferent domains, together with numerous tools (...) to debug, justify outcomes, and establish the safety, fairness and reliability of the models. This variety of tasks has led to inconsistencies in the terminology with, for instance, terms such as interpretable, explainable and transparent being often used interchangeably in methodology papers. These words, however, convey diferent meanings and are “weighted" diferently across domains, for example in the technical and social sciences. In this paper, we propose an overarching terminology of interpretability of AI systems that can be referred to by the technical developers as much as by the social sciences community to pursue clarity and efciency in the defnition of regulations for ethical and reliable AI development. We show how our taxonomy and defnition of interpretable AI difer from the ones in previous research and how they apply with high versatility to several domains and use cases, proposing a—highly needed—standard for the communication among interdisciplinary areas of AI. (shrink)

The paper aims at identifying, explaining and illustrating the affordances of “creative nonfiction” as a style of writing social science. The first part introduces creative nonfiction as a method of writing which brings together empirical material and fiction. In the second part, based on illustrations from my ethnographic research of European “crisis reporters,” written in the form of a novel about a fictional journalist, but also based on a review of existing social science research that employs (...) a creative method of writing, I identify several main affordances of creative nonfiction in social-scientific research. In particular, I argue that creative nonfiction allows scientists to illustrate their findings, to express them in an allegorical way, to organize data into a narrative, to let their pieces of research act in the social world, and to permeate research accounts with self-reflexive moments. I also discuss some apparent negative affordances: challenges that creative nonfiction poses to readers and to the institutionalized academic discourse. Finally, I suggest that writing about sociological problems in the style of creative nonfiction can help to produce more engaging and engaged texts, and I discuss the ethical implications of the approach. (shrink)

The approach of structuralism came to philosophy from social science. It was also in social science where, in 1950–1970s, in the form of the French structuralism, the approach gained its widest recognition. Since then, however, the approach fell out of favour in social science. Recently, structuralism is gaining currency in the philosophy of mathematics. After ascertaining that the two structuralisms indeed share a common core, the question stands whether general structuralism could not find its (...) way back into social science. The nature of the major objections raised against French structuralism – concerning its alleged ahistoricism, methodological holism and universalism – are reconsidered. While admittedly grounded as far as French structuralism is concerned, these objections do not affect general structuralism as such. The fate of French structuralism thus does not seem to preclude the return of general structuralism into social science, rather, it provides some hints where the difficulties may lie. (shrink)

How should we theorize about the social world? How can we integrate theories, models and approaches from seemingly incompatible disciplines? Does theory affect social reality? This state-of-the-art collection addresses contemporary methodological questions and interdisciplinary developments in the philosophy of social science. Facilitating a mutually enriching dialogue, chapters by leading social scientists are followed by critical evaluations from philosophers of social science. This exchange showcases recent major theoretical and methodological breakthroughs and challenges in the (...) social sciences, as well as fruitful ways in which the analytic tools developed in philosophy of science can be applied to understand these advancements. The volume covers a diverse range of principles, methods, innovations and applications, including scientific and methodological pluralism, performativity of theories, causal inferences and applications of social science to policy and business. Taking a practice-orientated and interactive approach, it offers a new philosophy of social science grounded in and relevant to the emerging social science practice. (shrink)

Since Circular 34 from the Ministry of Science and Technology of Vietnam required the head of the national project to have project results published in ISI/Scopus journals in 2014, the field of economics has been dominating the number of nationally-funded projects in social sciences and humanities. However, there has been no scientometric study that focuses on the difference in productivity among fields in Vietnam. Thus, harnessing the power of the SSHPA database, a comprehensive dataset of 1,564 Vietnamese authors (...) (854 males, 705 females) with 2,410 publications in the 2008 – 2018 period was extracted and analyzed. Various factors were considered including age, gender, new authors, leading authors, co-authorship, and Impact Factor. The findings suggest a high level of contribution from authors at the age of 40 – 44 in economics (858 publications) in a 12-years period, which is equivalent to the social medicine total output, and two times more than the total output of the education. Moreover, the presence and reinforcement of male researchers are still dominating in Economics and other fields, with the only exception of education. Despite the rapid rise in the number of Vietnamese lead authors, gender disparity among disciplines is an issue. Contrary to the strong international collaboration-oriented tendency in social medicine, economics, and other fields, educational authors are not open to international collaborating. Finally, most of the publications in economics belong to the group with JIF from 0 to 2, in contrast with the high number of social medicine publications with JIF from 2 to 5, which suggesting the field of economics is fulfilling the quantity, but still, need more quality publications. (shrink)

The classical theory of computation does not represent an adequate model of reality for simulation in the social sciences. The aim of this paper is to construct a methodological perspective that is able to conciliate the formal and empirical logic of program verification in computer science, with the interpretative and multiparadigmatic logic of the social sciences. We attempt to evaluate whether social simulation implies an additional perspective about the way one can understand the concepts of program (...) and computation. We demonstrate that the logic of social simulation implies at least two distinct types of program verifications that reflect an epistemological distinction in the kind of knowledge one can have about programs. Computer programs seem to possess a causal capability (Fetzer, 1999) and an intentional capability that scientific theories seem not to possess. This distinction is associated with two types of program verification, which we call empirical and intentional verification. We demonstrate, by this means, that computational phenomena are also intentional phenomena, and that such is particularly manifest in agent-based social simulation. Ascertaining the credibility of results in social simulation requires a focus on the identification of a new category of knowledge we can have about computer programs. This knowledge should be considered an outcome of an experimental exercise, albeit not empirical, acquired within a context of limited consensus. The perspective of intentional computation seems to be the only one possible to reflect the multiparadigmatic character of social science in terms of agent-based computational social science. We contribute, additionally, to the clarification of several questions that are found in the methodological perspectives of the discipline, such as the computational nature, the logic of program scalability, and the multiparadigmatic character of agent-based simulation in the social sciences. (shrink)

Social science is often described as a product of 19th century Europe, and as a handmaiden to its imperial and colonial projects. However, centuries prior to the Western social science enterprise, Islamic imperial scholars developed their own ‘science of society.’ This essay provides an overview of the historical and cultural milieu in which 'Islamic' social science was born, and then charts its development over time through case studies of four seminal scholars -- al-Razi, (...) al-Farabi, al-Biruni and Ibn Khaldun -- who played pivotal roles in establishing fields that could be roughly translated as psychology, political science, anthropology and sociology. The axioms undergirding Islamic social science are subsequently explored, with particular emphasis paid to the relations between said axioms and the discursive tradition, 'Islam.' The essay concludes with an exploration of how looking to social science enterprises beyond the ‘modern’ West can clarify the purported relationships between social science and empire. (shrink)

This study presents a description of an open database on scientific output of Vietnamese researchers in social sciences and humanities, one that corrects for the shortcomings in current research publication databases such as data duplication, slow update, and a substantial cost of doing science. Here, using scientists’ self-reports, open online sources and cross-checking with Scopus database, we introduce a manual system and its semi-automated version of the database on the profiles of 657 Vietnamese researchers in social sciences (...) and humanities who have published in Scopus-indexed journals from 2008 to 2018. The final system also records 973 foreign co-authors, 1,289 papers, and 789 affiliations. The data collection method, highly applicable for other sources, could be replicated in other developing countries while its content be used in cross-section, multivariate, and network data analyses. The open database is expected to help Vietnam revamp its research capacity and meet the public demand for greater transparency in science management. (shrink)