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This paper is written by a geographer and discusses the importance of 'thinking space relationally' in, and for, the social sciences. According to its advocates, relational thinking insists on an open-ended, mobile, networked and actor-centred geographic becoming. I position relational space within the lineage of philosophical approaches to space, drawing on examples taken mainly from human geography. Following this, the paper highlights some silences and limits, namely factors that constrain, structure and connect space. I acknowledge relationality but insist on the connected, sometimes inertial, and always context-specific nature of spatiality. The paper then considers the normative implications of this for politics, thinking first about regions, and then about policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the death of strong reductionism, philosophers of science have expanded the horizons of their understandings of the physical, mental, and social worlds, and the complex relations among them. To give one interesting example, John Dupre has endorsed a notion of downward causation: ‘higher-level’ events causing events at a ‘lower’ ontological level. For example, my intention to type the letter ‘t’ causes the particular motions experienced by all the atoms in my left forefinger as I type it. The proper explanation of the motions of an atom at the tip of my forefinger primarily involves my intentions, rather than (for example) the immediately preceding motions of other nearby atoms, or any other such particle–level events. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Gintis assumes file behavioral (=social) sciences are in disarray, and so proposes a theory for their unification. Examination of the unity of the physical sciences reveals he misunderstands the unity of science in general, and so fails to see that the social sciences are already unified with tile physical sciences. Another explanation of tile differences between them is outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proposal to add the behavioral momentum metaphor to Skinnerian psychology and the use of other borrowed physical explanatory concepts such as velocity and inertial mass has only superficial value. The basic problem is that, in contrast to Newtonian physics, the "laws" do not apply to a significant proportion of the phenomena to be explained, and these evidential discrepancies are ignored, rather than being used to modify the scientific explanations and improve technological applications that are based on those explanations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]