Abstract: One of the strikingly iconoclastic features of actor-network theory is its juxtaposition of the claim to be a realist perspective with denials that supposedly natural phenomena existed before scien...

Abstract: Causal mechanisms theory (CMT) has provided an important contribution to the theory of social explanation. This article considers whether CMT also makes a contribution to improvement of social science methodology. Methodology serves as a guide to the construction of research questions and explanatory hypotheses. Research is guided by background assumptions about the ontology of the domain of investigation. CMT provides a valuable ontology for social science research. Furthermore, it provides a valuable research heuristic: “seek out the causal mechanisms that underlie an outcome of interest.” CMT does indeed have valuable implications for social science investigation, hypothesis formation, and research strategy.

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Abstract: In this article, I clarify some of the key concepts and commitments of realist social ontology in economics. To do so, I make use of a recent critique of Lawson’s Reorienting Economics by Mohun and Veneziani. Their article provides a useful foil because responding to their critique allows us to emphasize that realism’s claims are more conditional and less controversial than one might otherwise anticipate. The basic claim is that ontology matters and that explicit recognition and consideration of ontological issues can be beneficial. However, developing a focus on ontology can create problems of interpretation among economists regarding what is being claimed and offered. I discuss some of these with reference to an adaption of Maki’s concept of economics imperialism and also with reference to Mary Morgan’s recent typology of experiments.

Abstract: We present an inferentialist account of collective rationality and intentionality, according to which beliefs and other intentional states are understood in terms of the normative statuses attributed to, and undertaken by, the participants of a discursive practice—namely, their discursive or practical commitments and entitlements. Although these statuses are instituted by the performances and attitudes of the agents, they are not identified with any physical or psychological entity, process or relation. Therefore, we argue that inferentialism allows us to talk of collective intentionality and agency without needing to posit the existence of any sort of collective psychology or mind.

Abstract: This article criticizes a view about the interpretation of human action, labeled in the text as interpretivism. This view posits a sharp separation between the natural and social sciences, to the effect that the methods of the latter cannot be applied to the former. I criticize this standpoint by reconstructing a case of educational research. As I argue, the case I analyze indicates that the arguments in support of interpretivism are contradicted by what social researchers can actually achieve. I conclude that the interpretivistic claims lack support and that the general separation claim appears as problematic.

Abstract: This paper argues that historicism can provide substantive philosophical grounds for critical theory and various modes of critique. Unlike the developmental historicism that dominated the nineteent...

Abstract: The aim of John Searle’s philosophy of society is to provide a foundation for the social sciences. Arguing that the study of social reality needs to be based on a philosophy of language, Searle claims that sociology has little to offer since no sociologist ever took language seriously. Attacking Durkheim head-on, Searle not only claims that Durkheim’s project differs from his own but also that Durkheim’s sociology has serious shortcomings. Opposing Searle, this paper argues that Durkheim’s account of social reality is still viable and that Searle’s attack backfires on his own theoretical project.

Abstract: This article attempts to evidence the idea that progress in social theory is impeded by central theoretical procedures embodying a host of conceptual mistakes. The article focuses on realist theori...

Abstract: Einstein considered fallibilist methodology obvious and metaphysics the challenging heuristic of physics. This philosophy is a minority view in academic philosophy. Most commentators on Einstein reject it and either refuse to ascribe it to him or declare it an impediment to his researches, his own opinion to the contrary notwithstanding.

Abstract: In this article, it is argued that Sellars’ view of normativity is the key for a proper resolution of the debate between normativism and anti-normativism, as the latter is described in Turner’s recent book Explaining the Normative. Drawing on an early Sellarsian article (“A Semantical Solution to the Mind-Body Problem”), I suggest that both normativism and anti-normativism (including Turner’s brand of the latter) are ultimately unsatisfactory positions and for the same reason: due to their failure to draw a distinction between causal or explanatory reducibility and logical or conceptual reducibility of the normative to the non-normative.

Abstract: In this article, I argue that a capacity for mindreading conceived along the line of simulation theory provides the cognitive basis for forming we-centric representations of actions and goals. This...

Abstract: This article is a response to Frank Hindriks’ “Restructuring Searle’s Making the Social World.”

Abstract: Standard economic theory usually analyzes the decisions made by individuals as a rational process in which each individual has sound and consistent preferences and makes decisions according to the principle of subjective expected utility maximization. Starting from the pioneering work of Herbert Simon and the research of cognitive psychologists Kahneman and Tversky, the contributions provided by cognitive-behavioral theory have repeatedly shown that real agents make choices in a way that differs systematically from standard theory, hence highlighting its limits. Rather than considering standard normative theory as false or unable to explain the data obtained by behavioral economists, several economists decided to develop new formal models that could include the results of different experiments and empirical observations that captured all dimensions of the choice made by an individual. In this sense, they proposed new models that were not intended to challenge standard theory but rather designed to provide...

Abstract: This article argues that evolutionary models based on selection validate, under appropriate conditions, the relevance of optimality as an explanatory mechanism in rational choice theory. The reason is that these frameworks share the mechanism that drives the results, namely, optimization, even if they situate it at different levels. The consequences of our argument are twofold. First, it resolves the tension between those predictions of rational choice theory that are accurate and the evidence showing that individuals seldom optimize. Second, it relativizes the explanatory import of rationality without diminishing the role of optimization as a mechanism.

Abstract: This article responds to Philip Walsh’s defence (in the March 2014 issue, Vol. 44 (2): 179-200) of the traditional Lockean “underlaborer” conception of the role of philosophy against Norbert Elias’s sociology of knowledge. The article argues, contra Walsh, that the “post-philosophical” status of sociology is already a historical fait accompli. The author challenges Walsh’s contention that Elias’s perspectival sociological theory of knowledge is fatally flawed by its improper use of the concept of process as a central principle. The response concludes that Walsh’s article is a formidable mobilization of logical, conceptual, analytical, and other theoretical resources tacitly designed to save the autonomy of philosophy at all costs in the face of the advanced sociology of knowledge of Elias.

Abstract: A book in which analytic philosophers examine the portrayal of sex in art and the possible artistic value of pornography proves a disappointment. Although a transcendental objection to pornographic...

Abstract: Most theories of intentional action agree that if acting for a reason is a necessary condition for the action in question to be an intentional action, the reason need not genuinely justify it. The same should hold for shared intentional action, toward which philosophers of action have recently turned their attention. I argue that some of the necessary conditions proposed for shared intention turn out to require that we deny this claim. They entail that shared intention is possible only if the participating agents form their intentions on the grounds of genuinely rational considerations. Thus, they “over-rationalize,” as I call it, shared intention.

Abstract: This article responds to Stephen Turner’s discussion of my article, “Historicism and Critique.” I emphasize that radical historicism consists of substantive philosophical commitments. One commitment is to a historicized epistemology that presents objective knowledge as a product of a comparison between rival webs of belief. Another commitment is to a historical ontology that presents aggregate concepts in the social sciences as inherently pragmatic. These substantive commitments provide a plausible basis for various forms of critique. They lead to analyses of genealogical and ideological critique that differ from appeals to genealogy as a kind of groundless skepticism toward, and problematization of, all substantive commitments.

Abstract: Stephen Turner defends the sociopolitical role that experts—mainly but not only of the scientific kind—play in modern democratic society and explores means for increasing the rationality of their employment Laudable though this is, at times Turner goes into more detail than democratic principles require; in his enthusiasm for rationality, he aims at levels of adequacy that are not always within the grasp of democracy

Abstract: This article responds to Richard Kilminster’s critique of my earlier article published in Philosophy of the Social Sciences (2014), which raised questions about the status and limits of Norbert Eli...

Abstract: Mark Bevir raises the question of how genealogy, understood as a technique-based radical historicism, and the notion of the contingency of ideas, ground “critique.” His problem is to avoid the relativism of radical historicism in a way that allows for “critique” without appealing to non-radical historicist absolutisms of the kind that ground the notion of false consciousness. He does so by appealing to the notion of motivated irrationality, which he claims avoids the problem of relativism and the problems of “false consciousness.” The genealogies of Nietzsche and Foucault, however, do not ground “critique.” The relevant normative judgments, of nobility in Nietzsche, for example, are presupposed.

Abstract: All this is wrapped up in the final chapter by suggesting whether modern economics is a science or mere ideology can be answered by focusing on the role of what Backhouse calls a myth. Basing economic policies on implications of models that are knowingly built with unrealistic assumptions or worse ideologically friendly assumption creates myths. And it is difficult to see how economics could ever be truly scientific if economists insist on maintaining such myths. As it seems intended, I think this is an excellent book for non-economists who are curious about how we got in such a mess as the Great Recession. Nothing requires the reader to know much about economics and certainly does not require having recently taken an economics class. And particularly any philosopher of social science who has not studied economics will certainly find this book very useful.

Abstract: This paper offers a brief reply to William Morgan’s critique of my review of Andrei Marmor’s Social Conventions (2009). Morgan’s principal critique is that I am wrong to think that the constitutive rules of games do not determine their aims and values. In particular, with regards to chess, Morgan argues that the rules of chess determine that the aim of playing chess is to win the game. I defend my position that one can play the game of chess without the aim of winning - e.g. one can aim to play beautifully, and not, as Morgan suggests, only to win beautifully. More broadly, I argue for an account of games that is sensitive to the gap between playing and the game’s constitutive rules. Ultimately, the argument points to the descriptive priority for the social sciences of the concept of ‘play’ over the concept of games understood as ‘rule-governed domains’.

Abstract: Chagnon narrates the ups and downs of his career, how he managed to document the basic ethnography of the Yanomamo of Amazonia, and the loss of scientific compass in American anthropology that brought a good deal of personal villification and the end of his research. The reviewer endorses the view that organized American anthropology is in an intellectually sorry state but argues that Chagnon’s anthropology of anthropology is lacking.

Abstract: The order of influence from thesis to hypothesis, and from philosophy to the social sciences, has historically governed the way in which the abstraction and significance of language as an empirical object is determined. In this paper, an argument is made for the development of a more reflexive intellectual relationship between ordinary language philosophy (OLP) and the social sciences that it helped inspire. It is demonstrated that, and how, the social scientific traditions of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis press OLP to re-consider the variety of problematic abstractions it has previously made for the sake of philosophical clarity, thereby self-reinvigorating.

Abstract: Natural experiments are an increasingly popular research design in political science. This popularity raises a number of questions. First, what are natural experiments and why are they appealing? Second, what makes a good natural experiment? And finally, are natural experiments able to provide resources for knowledge production that other methodologies cannot or do not provide? Using Mary Morgan’s and Thad Dunning’s recent work on natural experiments, I offer answers to the first two questions and use the analysis to argue that natural experiments highlight features of knowledge production that support methodological pluralism and the multiple aims of research.