Download or read book Interpretation and Social Knowledge written by Isaac Ariail Reed and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the past fifty years anxiety over naturalism has driven debates in social theory. One side sees social science as another kind of natural science, while the other rejects the possibility of objective and explanatory knowledge. Interpretation and Social Knowledge suggests a different route, offering a way forward for an antinaturalist sociology that overcomes the opposition between interpretation and explanation and uses theory to build concrete, historically specific causal explanations of social phenomena.
Download or read book Inventing Human Science written by Christopher Fox and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The human sciences—including psychology, anthropology, and social theory—are widely held to have been born during the eighteenth century. This first full-length, English-language study of the Enlightenment sciences of humans explores the sources, context, and effects of this major intellectual development. The book argues that the most fundamental inspiration for the Enlightenment was the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Natural philosophers from Copernicus to Newton had created a magisterial science of nature based on the realization that the physical world operated according to orderly, discoverable laws. Eighteenth-century thinkers sought to cap this achievement with a science of human nature. Belief in the existence of laws governing human will and emotion; social change; and politics, economics, and medicine suffused the writings of such disparate figures as Hume, Kant, and Adam Smith and formed the basis of the new sciences. A work of remarkable cross-disciplinary scholarship, this volume illuminates the origins of the human sciences and offers a new view of the Enlightenment that highlights the period's subtle social theory, awareness of ambiguity, and sympathy for historical and cultural difference.
Download or read book The Order of Things written by Michel Foucault and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-08-18 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When one defines "order" as a sorting of priorities, it becomes beautifully clear as to what Foucault is doing here. With virtuoso showmanship, he weaves an intensely complex history of thought. He dips into literature, art, economics and even biology in The Order of Things, possibly one of the most significant, yet most overlooked, works of the twentieth century. Eclipsed by his later work on power and discourse, nonetheless it was The Order of Things that established Foucault's reputation as an intellectual giant. Pirouetting around the outer edge of language, Foucault unsettles the surface of literary writing. In describing the limitations of our usual taxonomies, he opens the door onto a whole new system of thought, one ripe with what he calls "exotic charm". Intellectual pyrotechnics from the master of critical thinking, this book is crucial reading for those who wish to gain insight into that odd beast called Postmodernism, and a must for any fan of Foucault.
Download or read book Shaping Human Science Disciplines written by Christian Fleck and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-09-01 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents an analysis of the institutional development of selected social science and humanities (SSH) disciplines in Argentina, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Where most narratives of a scholarly past are presented as a succession of ‘ideas,’ research results and theories, this collection highlights the structural shifts in the systems of higher education, as well as institutions of research and innovation (beyond the universities) within which these disciplines have developed. This institutional perspective will facilitate systematic comparisons between developments in various disciplines and countries. Across eight country studies the book reveals remarkably different dynamics of disciplinary growth between countries, as well as important interdisciplinary differences within countries. In addition, instances of institutional contractions and downturns and veritable breaks of continuity under authoritarian political regimes can be observed, which are almost totally absent from narratives of individual disciplinary histories. This important work will provide a valuable resource to scholars of disciplinary history, the history of ideas, the sociology of education and of scientific knowledge.
Download or read book Cultural Evolution written by Alex Mesoudi and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-07-30 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Darwin changed the course of scientific thinking by showing how evolution accounts for the stunning diversity and biological complexity of life on earth. Recently, there has also been increased interest in the social sciences in how Darwinian theory can explain human culture. Covering a wide range of topics, including fads, public policy, the spread of religion, and herd behavior in markets, Alex Mesoudi shows that human culture is itself an evolutionary process that exhibits the key Darwinian mechanisms of variation, competition, and inheritance. This cross-disciplinary volume focuses on the ways cultural phenomena can be studied scientifically—from theoretical modeling to lab experiments, archaeological fieldwork to ethnographic studies—and shows how apparently disparate methods can complement one another to the mutual benefit of the various social science disciplines. Along the way, the book reveals how new insights arise from looking at culture from an evolutionary angle. Cultural Evolution provides a thought-provoking argument that Darwinian evolutionary theory can both unify different branches of inquiry and enhance understanding of human behavior.
Download or read book Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences written by Graham Button and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1991-08-30 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through its empirical inquiries into the ordered properties of social action, this text demonstrates how ethnomethodology provides a radical respecification of the foundations of the human sciences, an achievement that has often been misunderstood.
Download or read book The Fair Society written by Peter Corning and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-04 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We've been told, again and again, that life is unfair. But what if we're wrong simply to resign ourselves to this situation? Drawing on the evidence from our evolutionary history and the emergent science of human nature, this title shows that we have an innate sense of fairness.
Download or read book Social Science Research written by Anol Bhattacherjee and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2012-04-01 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is designed to introduce doctoral and graduate students to the process of conducting scientific research in the social sciences, business, education, public health, and related disciplines. It is a one-stop, comprehensive, and compact source for foundational concepts in behavioral research, and can serve as a stand-alone text or as a supplement to research readings in any doctoral seminar or research methods class. This book is currently used as a research text at universities on six continents and will shortly be available in nine different languages.
Download or read book The Lively Science written by Michael Agar and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-10 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Lively Science is Michael Agar's accessible, idiosyncratic, often humorous, and sometimes controversial explication of his own polestar truth: "Research on humans in their social world by other humans is not a traditional science like the one created by Galileo and Newton." However, if the social world is not a lab, neither is it a collection of random events. The book lays out a clear, straightforward path to carrying out the basic scientific tasks of forming questions and answering them to explore and account for that non-randomness. The author deploys myriad engaging examples drawn from a lifetime of applied and basic research to demonstrate how human science researchers can produce discoveries that are scientifically defensible and useful in the real world. Agar grounds his how-to guide in an approachable discussion of epistemology and draws on thinkers whose writings may be unfamiliar to many social scientists. He blends that work with new intellectual tools, such as complexity theory, disasters research, and conversational analysis. The result is an innovative and practical methodology that is true to the realities and surprises of research by and about humans, yet preserves scientific standards of falsifiability, empiricism, logic, and systematic presentation of results. This book represents the best of Michael Agar's visionary work. With a new foreword by Michael Brown celebrating Agar's enormous contribution to social science methodology, The Lively Science is for all researchers who seek to explore the full potential of a human social science.
Download or read book Laboratory Life written by Bruno Latour and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-04 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This highly original work presents laboratory science in a deliberately skeptical way: as an anthropological approach to the culture of the scientist. Drawing on recent work in literary criticism, the authors study how the social world of the laboratory produces papers and other "texts,"' and how the scientific vision of reality becomes that set of statements considered, for the time being, too expensive to change. The book is based on field work done by Bruno Latour in Roger Guillemin's laboratory at the Salk Institute and provides an important link between the sociology of modern sciences and laboratory studies in the history of science.
Download or read book Paradigms of Social Order written by Sergio Dellavalle and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-05-27 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No social life is possible without order. Order being the most constituent element of society, it is not surprising that so many theories have been developed to explain what social order is and how it is possible, as well as to explore the features that social order acquires in its different dimensions. The book leads these many theories of social order back to a few main matrices for the use of theoretical and practical reason, which are defined as 'paradigms of order'. The plurality of conceptual constructs regarding social order is therefore reduced to a manageable number of theoretical patterns and an intellectual map is produced in which the most significant differences between paradigms are clearly outlined. Furthermore, the 'paradigmatic revolutions' are addressed that marked the most relevant turning points in the way in which a 'well-ordered society' should be understood. Against this background, the question is discussed on the theoretical and practical perspectives for a cosmopolitan society as the only suitable possibility to meet the global challenges with which we are all presently confronted.
Download or read book The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences written by Ian Shapiro and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this captivating yet troubling book, Ian Shapiro offers a searing indictment of many influential practices in the social sciences and humanities today. Perhaps best known for his critique of rational choice theory, Shapiro expands his purview here. In discipline after discipline, he argues, scholars have fallen prey to inward-looking myopia that results from--and perpetuates--a flight from reality. In the method-driven academic culture we inhabit, argues Shapiro, researchers too often make display and refinement of their techniques the principal scholarly activity. The result is that they lose sight of the objects of their study. Pet theories and methodological blinders lead unwelcome facts to be ignored, sometimes not even perceived. The targets of Shapiro's critique include the law and economics movement, overzealous formal and statistical modeling, various reductive theories of human behavior, misguided conceptual analysis in political theory, and the Cambridge school of intellectual history. As an alternative to all of these, Shapiro makes a compelling case for problem-driven social research, rooted in a realist philosophy of science and an antireductionist view of social explanation. In the lucid--if biting--prose for which Shapiro is renowned, he explains why this requires greater critical attention to how problems are specified than is usually undertaken. He illustrates what is at stake for the study of power, democracy, law, and ideology, as well as in normative debates over rights, justice, freedom, virtue, and community. Shapiro answers many critics of his views along the way, securing his position as one of the distinctive social and political theorists of our time.
Download or read book Environmental Social Science written by Emilio F. Moran and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-09-09 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Environmental Social Science offers a new synthesis of environmental studies, defining the nature of human-environment interactions and providing the foundation for a new cross-disciplinary enterprise that will make critical theories and research methods accessible across the natural and social sciences. Makes key theories and methods of the social sciences available to biologists and other environmental scientists Explains biological theories and concepts for the social sciences community working on the environment Helps bridge one of the difficult divides in collaborative work in human-environment research Includes much-needed descriptions of how to carry out research that is multinational, multiscale, multitemporal, and multidisciplinary within a complex systems theory context
Download or read book Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness Volume 1 written by István Mészáros and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2010-02 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new work (the first in a two-volume series) by the leading Marxian philosopher of our day is a milestone in human self-understanding. It focuses on the location where action emerges from freedom and necessity, thefoundation of all social science. Today, as never before, the investigation of the close relationship between social structure—defined by Marx as "arising from the life-process of definite individuals"—and the various forms of consciousness is particularly important. We can only perceive what is possible by first identifying the historical process that constrains consciousness itself and therefore social action. The relationship between social structure and forms of consciousness discussed in this volume is multifaceted and profoundly dialectical. It requires the presentation of a great wealth of historical material and the assessment of the relevant philosophical literature, from Descartes through Hegel and the Liberal tradition to the present, together with their connections with political economy and political theory. István Mészáros moves beyond both abstract solutions to the surveyed methodological questions and one-sided structuralist evaluation of the important substantive issues, bringing the process of our understanding of social structure and consciousness to a level not previously attained. Above all, in the spirit of the Marxian approach, even the most complicated problems are always analyzed in relation to the major practical concerns of our time. The primary aim of this work is to outline the dialectical intelligibility of historical development toward a viable societal reproductive order. Social Structures and Forms of Consciousness is of the highest importance as both a political and philosophical work, illuminating the place from where we must act, today.
Download or read book Narrating Social Order written by Shelley Zipora Reuter and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Policies implemented in the mid to late 1990s in Ontario by Mike Harris's Conservative government have had undeniable repercussions for the population of that province. Kate Bezanson's Gender, the State, and Social Reproduction is the first study to consider the implications of those policies for gender relations - that is, how women and men, families, and households coped with these changes, and how division of labour and standards of living were affected. Bezanson also considers implications of neo-liberalism more generally, for the lives of people living under such regimes. Beginning with an outline of the restructuring experiment which took place under the Conservative government between 1995 and 2000, Bezanson shows how this process dramatically altered the scope of the welfare state, labour market protections and conditions, and the capacity for people to manage and plan their own lives. She combines this detailed investigation of the changes introduced by Harris with data collected in in-depth interviews of selected Ontario households, in order to examine how neo-liberalism affects daily lives, particularly of low income people, and especially of women. Ultimately, Bezanson finds that the neo-liberal restructuring of Ontario in the 1990s consolidated a gender regime that was highly unsustainable for poor households, many of which were lead by women. A controversial and illuminating study, Gender, the State, and Social Reproduction crosses the disciplines of politics, history, gender studies, and sociology.
Download or read book Current Catalog written by National Library of Medicine (U.S.) and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 1340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First multi-year cumulation covers six years: 1965-70.
Download or read book The Americans written by Hugo Munsterberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 815 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Americans by Hugo Munsterberg stands alongside Alexis de Tocqueville's American Democracy as one of the great works on the New World written by a scholar deeply familiar with the Old World. When originally published, it gave the German public a sense of American life, and was described as "a book which deals in a detailed way with the political, economic, intellectual, and social aspects of American culture." Munsterberg, a world-renowned psychologist at the turn of the twentieth century, noted that "its purpose is to interpret systematically the democratic ideals of America."The primary aim of The Americans is to study the people and America's inner tendencies. It offers a "philosophy of Americanism," the ideology of a people writ whole. Munsterberg's sense of the "spirit" of a people, rather than facts about the people, is revealed in his four cardinal chapters: Self-Direction, Self-Realization, Self-Perfection, and Self-Assertion. While he covers the economic premises of the free market and the politics of party affairs, he considers these the least important. Instead it is the lasting forces and tendencies of American life, rather than problems of the day, that occupy the author. This focus was shared by German readers, for whom the book was conceived, and for those in the United States who read the book in English.The dynamic of strong basic tendencies of democratic forces and lesser, but significant, aristocratic tendencies underwrites the strains and tensions in American society. It also defines the special nature of a book, written more than one hundred years ago, that retains its lively sense of purpose and deep insight into American life. One could well say that this book is required reading in this day and age for Americans and Europeans alike. This is a neglected masterpiece.
