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While no one denies that science depends on epistemic values, many philosophers of science have wrestled with the appropriate role of non-epistemic values, such as social, ethical, and political values. Recently, philosophers of science have overwhelmingly accepted that non-epistemic values should play a legitimate role in science. The recent philosophical debate has shifted from the value-free ideal in science to questions about how science should incorporate non-epistemic values. This article engages with such questions through an exploration of the environmental sciences. These sciences are a mosaic of diverse fields characterized by interdisciplinarity, problem-orientation, policy-directedness, and ubiquitous non-epistemic values. This article addresses a frequently voiced concern about many environmental science practices: that they ‘crowd out’ or displace significant non-epistemic values by either (1) entailing some non-epistemic values, rather than others, or by (2) obscuring discussion of non-epistemic values altogether. With three detailed case studies – monetizing nature, nature-society dualism, and ecosystem health – we show that the alleged problem of crowding out emerges from active debates within the environmental sciences. In each case, critics charge that the scientific practice in question displaces non-epistemic values in at least one of the two senses distinguished above. We show that crowding out is neither necessary nor always harmful when it occurs. However, we do see these putative objections to the application of environmental science as teaching valuable lessons about what matters for successful environmental science, all things considered. Given the significant role that many environmental scientists see for non-epistemic values in their fields, we argue that these cases motivate lessons about the importance of value-flexibility (that practices can accommodate a plurality of non-epistemic values), transparency about value-based decisions that inform practice, and environmental pragmatism.

Pragmatism, especially the works of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead, is in the midst of a revival in American sociology. American sociologists have drawn on these authors in their addressment of contemporary debates in the wider disciplinary field. Placing these contemporary applications of pragmatist thought alongside the broader intellectual tradition of pragmatic philosophy, however, demonstrates tensions associated with this revival. This paper draws on the work of John Dewey as a particularly stark case of the conflict between the philosophy of social science espoused by the original pragmatist philosophers and the use of their ideas in American sociology today. This treatment affords the opportunity to recover a vision for social science which has been overlooked in the contemporary pragmatist revival with deep implications for the practice of social science today.

This paper seeks to show ways in which analytic eclecticism can be strengthened to encourage hybrid theorizing capable of yielding more practically useful principles for foreign policy decision-makers. The paper also seeks to show that some of the advantages of analytic eclecticism are overstated, notably the ability to sidestep difficult questions in the philosophy of social science. Nevertheless, with a proper deepening of their discussion of pragmatism, the core of the practical consequences of analytic eclecticism can be advanced with greater force and with a strengthened methodological rationale.

Fifty years ago and still relevant today, C.P. Snow argued that the university is divided into two cultures, with humanities on the one side and the sciences on the other. This paper proposes a mod...

About two hundred years ago, the idea that truth was made rather than found began to take hold of the imagination of Europe. The French Revolution had shown that the whole vocabulary of social relations, and the whole spectrum of social institutions, could be replaced almost overnight. This precedent made Utopian politics the rule rather than the exception among intellectuals. Utopian politics sets aside questions about both the will of God and the nature of man and dreams of creating a hitherto unknown form of society. At about the same time, the Romantic poets were showing what happens when art is thought of no longer as imitation but, rather, as the artist's self-creation. The poets claimed for art the place in culture traditionally held by religion and philosophy, the place which the Enlightenment had claimed for science. The precedent the Romantics set lent initial plausibility to their claim. The actual role of novels, poems, plays, paintings, statues, and buildings in the social movements of the last century and a half has given it still greater plausibility. By now these two tendencies have joined forces and have achieved cultural hegemony. For most contemporary intellectuals, questions of ends as opposed to means – questions about how to give a sense to one's own life or that of one's community – are questions for art or politics, or both, rather than for religion, philosophy, or science.

Must a good general theory of law incorporate what is good for persons in general? This question has been at the center of methodological debates in general jurisprudence for decades. Answering “no,” Julie Dickson’s book Evaluation and Legal Theory offered both a clear and concise conspectus of positivist methodology, as well as a response to the longstanding objection that such an approach has to evaluate the data it studies rather than simply describe facts about legal systems. She agreed that legal positivism must evaluate. At the same time, she argued, it is possible to offer an evaluative theory of the nature of law that identifies law’s essential features, takes the views of its participants seriously, and prescinds from moral judgment. Twenty years on, the debate on this question persists and, despite increasing insight and sophistication, some wonder whether we have reached a dead end. To understand this dispute, and general jurisprudence’s methodological cul-de-sac, we need to broaden the range of questions and tools we bring to those arguments. To this end, this Review offers a mixture of the old and the new--demonstrating the usefulness of its approach by exploring the promise and limits of Dickson's work. In terms of the old, it argues that moralized approaches to general jurisprudence, especially the classical natural law tradition of legal theorizing, can better deliver on positivism's promise to offer theories of law that are both general and take seriously the point of view of participants. In terms of the new, it seeks to ground this approach in a broader philosophy of social science that avoids both reductive naturalism and relativistic particularity in its explanations. Law is intertwined with morality, but it is also a social fact: a practice and institution. Any general theory of jurisprudence, like any general theory of human practices and institutions, must reckon with the relationship between law's moral life and its factual existence. This Review begins the work of developing and rendering explicit such a social theory for a jurisprudence that takes both dimensions seriously.

Should the norms of honor cultures be classified as a variety of morality? In this paper, we address this question by considering various empirical bases on which norms can be taxonomically organised. This question is of interest both as an exercise in philosophy of social science, and for its potential implications in meta-ethical debates. Using recent data from anthropology and evolutionary game theory, we argue that the most productive classification emphasizes the strategic role that moral norms play in generating assurance and stabilizing cooperation. Because honor norms have a similar functional role, this account entails honor norms are indeed a variety of moral norm. We also propose an explanation of why honor norms occur in a relatively unified, phenotypically distinctive cluster, thereby explaining why it is tempting to regard them as taxonomically distinct.

When philosophers discuss the possibility of machines making scientific discoveries, they typically focus on discoveries in physics, biology, chemistry and mathematics. Observing the rapid increase of computer use in science, however, it becomes natural to ask whether there are any scientific domains out of reach for machine discovery. For example, could machines also make discoveries in qualitative social science? Is there something about humans that makes us uniquely suited to studying humans? Is there something about machines that would bar them from such activity? A close look at the methodology of interpretive social science reveals several abilities necessary to make a social scientific discovery (such as cognitive empathy and the ability to assign meaning) and one capacity necessary to possess any of them is imagination. Novel and significant interpretations required by social scientific discovery require imagination. For machines to make discoveries in social science, therefore, they must possess imagination algorithms.

The philosophy of Richard Rorty provides a useful justification for accepting epistemological diversity in sociology. In his view, intradisciplinary debates about what constitutes sociological knowledge are irresolvable because, at root, they are cultural disputes. But Rorty’s philosophy offers more than an elaborate justification for the status quo. He also provides a compelling rationale for sociologists to write passionately. Beyond simply improving our prose, passionate language may imbue sociological research with moral relevance, at least in Rorty’s terms.

Grand theorizing and empirical (quantitative or qualitative) research are often separately conducted. In this paper, the separation in question is traced from scholars' differential observance of the yardsticks of the philosophical, scientific and literary/historical methods respectively. The philosophical method relies on deduction and develops into grand theorizing by adding assumptions stemming from life experience, leading to conceptual fluidity. Contrarily, the scientific method relies on experiments, which produce more determinable outcomes as asserted by Popper's (1959) falsificationism. The literary/historical method shares this commitment to determinacy by providing in-depth understanding of space time-specific events/meanings. The roles of grand theorizing and empirical research are reviewed: grand theorizing provides categorical schemes, organizes assumptions into perspectives, uncovers hidden assumptions and generates arguments, while empirical research facilitates contextualized comparisons and generates theory. The other side of the story is then presented with the Central Dogma of Social Science, which limits the scope and determinacy of any social understanding with an inverse relationship. The central dogma constrains the possibility of social knowledge and, through institutionalized practice such as the acceptance of journal articles or staff promotion, academic development. For grand theorizing to 'survive', it needs to identify and reembrace its yardstick, which could then lead to confident communication with results generated by other methods.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to present a general scientific methodology on tenets from Mario Bunge’s philosophy.Design/methodology/approach– Systemic thinking and conceptual generalisation.Findings– A general scientific methodology based on tenets from Mario Bunge’s philosophy of social science.Research limitations/implications– Using quantitative methods to conduct a research to test Asplunds motivation theory and North’s action theory.Practical implications– How to conduct a research based on a systemic perspective.Social implications– An advantage of linking a systemic perspective to organisational psychology studies is that it may result in new ways of looking at old problems and bring new perspectives to the methods used. One explanation may be the fact that while researchers within various organisational psychology subject fields are largely specialists, the systemic perspective is oriented towards general scientific methodology.Originality/value– The authors have not seen anybody who have tried to apply systemic thinking as a general methodology for research.

Part 6: Philosophy; International audience; By changing everything we know about artificial intelligence (AI), the ways in which AI changes everything will be more plausible to explore. Arguments concerning AI as a potential threat are based on two taken-for-granted assumptions, namely, that AI exists as a separate category of intelligence, different to “natural” intelligence, and that intelligence is an inherent property of separable entities, such as humans or robots. Such arguments have given rise to ethical debates and media commentary concerned with AI, often quite extrapolating, followed by catastrophic scenarios. However, several discussions in the philosophy of social science (as well as in theoretical approaches to synthetic biology and cybernetics) have suggested (a) that the distinctions between “natural”/“human” and “artificial”/“nonhuman” are fallible, and (b) that intelligence should most likely be conceived as an environmental/systemic property or phenomenon – a shared cognition. In an attempt to import these discussions within the context of the socio-ethical implications of AI, this paper deconstructs the components of the term AI by focusing firstly on the invalidation of the term “artificial” and secondly on “intelligence.” By paraphrasing Lacan’s dictum that “the woman does not exist” as in relation to the man, this paper proposes that AI does not exist as in relation to a natural intelligence or in relation to non-intelligent entities. By this double, apparently simple, lesson learned from a re-examination of AI’s characteristics, a number of questions are raised, concerning the co-production of morality in meshed human/robotic societies, as well as a tentative agenda for future empirical investigations.

Ted Honderich offers “Attitudinism” as an alternative to the traditional categories of compatibilism and incompatibilism regarding free will and determinism. In earlier work, I argued that Attitudinism should, despite Honderich’s claims, be understood as a species of compatibilism. In the present chapter, I suggest a way of resisting my earlier argument. I begin by giving an overview of Attitudinism and summarize my earlier criticism. I then explore Honderich’s claim that we have multiple ideas of the nature of free will and connect Attitudinism with some recent work in the philosophy of social science regarding the nature and use of concepts.

As described in Beach and Dovemark’s 2007 book, Education and the Commodity Problem, critical researchers have identified two fundamental roles for modern-day schools within capitalist states. These are the ideological and material roles and function, where schools produce ideologically compliant workers and consumers for a corporatist economy on the one hand, this is partly through a teaching and a curriculum, which is often hidden and informal; and, on the other form part of a corporate business plan for the accumulation of private capital in the welfare sector through mass outsourcing of welfare-State education provision and the wholesale commodification of education as a public service. This article presents a research method for investigating education in these circumstances. It is a method with a philosophical foundation not only for understanding contemporary educational empirical reality under neoliberal forms of capitalism, but also for developing critical consciousness for the transcendence and transformation of this condition toward a more just form of political economy and human existence. This research method draws from critical realism and its concept of explanatory critique as a way to forge a scientifically robust Marxist critical ethnography. In relation to this, the description of the method accompanies an overview of some of the basic principles and broadly accepted possibilities of and for ethnography and critical ethnography, followed by a presentation of what Marxist critical ethnography is and how Marxist critical ethnography functions as explanatory critique, respectively. This entails description of what explanatory critique is, and how it can be used to develop a philosophy of social science and an ontological base for ethnography. The aforementioned components together expand on a historical, theoretical, conceptual, and political development of ethnography as part of a Marxist approach to research and practice for social transformation.

Research suggests that interventions involving extensive training or counterconditioning can reduce implicit prejudice and stereotyping, and even susceptibility to stereotype threat. This research is widely cited as providing an “existence proof” that certain entrenched social attitudes are capable of change, but is summarily dismissed as lacking direct, practical import for the broader struggle against prejudice and discrimination. Criticisms of these “debiasing” procedures fall into three categories: concerns about empirical efficacy, about practical feasibility, and about the failure to appreciate the underlying structural-institutional nature of discrimination. I reply to these criticisms of debiasing, and argue that a comprehensive strategy for combating prejudice and discrimination should include a central role for training our biases away.

Should the norms of honor cultures be classified as a variety of morality? In this paper, we address this question by considering various empirical bases on which norms can be taxonomically organised. This question is of interest both as an exercise in philosophy of social science, and for its potential implications in meta-ethical debates. Using recent data from anthropology and evolutionary game theory, we argue that the most productive classification emphasizes the strategic role that moral norms play in generating assurance and stabilizing cooperation. Because honor norms have a similar functional role, this account entails that honor norms are indeed a variety of moral norm. We also propose an explanation of why honor norms typically occur in a relatively unified, phenotypically distinctive cluster, thereby explaining why it is tempting to regard them as taxonomically distinct.

The writings of Bruno Latour have invigorated empirical inquiry in the social sciences and in the process helped to redefine their character. In recent years the philosophy of social science that made this inquiry possible has been deployed to a different end, namely that of rethinking the character of politics. Here I suggest that in the pursuit of this goal, inflated claims are made about that philosophy, and some basic theoretical tools are asked to do a job for which they may not be best equipped.

Since the inception of International Relations (IR) within university departments, its disciplinary status has been the subject of constant debate. Yet, the current literature on ‘the state of the discipline’ silences this debate either through IR’s assumed disciplinarity or conflation of debates about theory with the existence of IR. This Forum moves beyond this literature by explicitly engaging whether IR is a discipline or not and by enquiring how this status matters. Contributors rely on the sociology and philosophy of social science to call into question or affirm the disciplinarity of IR to argue whether IR is as a subfield of Political Science, a full-blown and autonomous discipline, or a hybrid field of interdisciplinary studies. Furthermore, contributors reveal the implications of the different disciplinary statuses regarding the academic institution, interdisciplinary possibilities and modes of organizing IR. Overall, these contributions aim to engage rather than close the disciplinary debate, creating further space for reflection.

Following introductory remarks on Mills’s academic persona and current reputation, I pursue two lines of investigation. First, I analyze the deep structure of his thought, constituted by a pragmatist epistemology and a radical sociology, or ‘politics of truth.’ Then I argue that this structure is undermined by inconsistencies between its two components.

This article examines the insights into how people actually behave from behavioural economics and how this affects economic explanation and prescription. It argues that implications for explanation are likely always to be contestable (because, as a new source of empirical evidence, behavioural economics encounters familiar problems with empiricism). The implications for prescription, however, are potentially significant, although not in the direction popularised by 'nudging'. Indeed, the behavioural insights suggest that public policy should be less concerned with forms of preference satisfaction and more concerned with individual autonomy. On many accounts of the philosophy of social science, the tension between these insights into behaviour and the dominant model of rational choice would likely consign behavioural economics to the margins of the discipline. In this context, however, this is not true, and the article concludes with a discussion of this puzzle. Copyright , Oxford University Press.

One reason the Unity of Science Movement thrived in 1930s America was that most intellectuals at the time were socialist. Agreeing that comprehensive scientific planning required a comprehensive, or unified, science, most of these intellectuals automatically respected Neurath and the Unity of Science Movement as ideological allies. The need for social action demands that social science be unencumbered by doctrines which have no active, operative significance. Twenty years later, at the end of the 1950s, American philosophy of science was quite a different business. Politics had nothing to do with philosophy of science, and the Unity of Science Movement was effectively dead. Philosophy of social science, in other words, was the closest professional philosophy of science could get to social philosophy, but it still did not get there. Philosophy of science was about structural, semantic and pragmatic features of scientific theories, which in turn had nothing to do with debates or theories concerning 'the worth of some social arrangements'.

The opening topic whose thesis needs clarification is, "The Question of Objectivity, its Implications for the Social Sciences in the Era of Postmodernism: Africa in Perspective", published in the Special Issue of this journal on Postmodernism and African Philosophy (Volume 3, Number 2, July-December 2014, pp.50-61). The sequence of the argument in this paper which was meant to create a liberating ground from the suspicious position of the African mind in relation to globalization takes the following pattern: can the social sciences be regarded as science? Must the social science be reduced to the methods in the natural sciences before it can be called science? Does the social science retain any capacity for objective truth? To the above questions, what could be gleaned from the paper is that, the social sciences can justifiably be regarded as science, the social science must not necessarily meet the requirements of the methods of the natural sciences to be called science and that the social science has a right claim to objectivity.

Societal problems represent both opportunities and challenges for private and public organizations. Issues such as poverty, climate change and inequality can be seen either as a burden or as a source for innovation. Multinational Corporations, Nonprofit Organizations (NGOs), Cooperatives and Social-Purpose Organizations (SPOs) have engaged in projects that can tackle some of these major societal issues. The paper explores existing discussion over controversial social marketing concept and develops superior conceptualization of social innovation marketing concept based on pluralist research paradigm found in the philosophy of social science literature.

In recent decades, numerous psychological and sociological theories have been offered in the attempt to explain human cognition, motivation, and behavior in fundamentally evolutionary terms. Drawing inspiration from the Darwinian theory of natural selection, evolutionary approaches to social science argue that behavior arises primarily from underlying evolved psychological mechanisms and that the central task of social science is to identify and articulate the specific nature of such mechanisms. Much effort has been expended by evolutionary social scientists to definitively identify the various evolved psychological mechanisms that account for the diversity of human cognitive, emotional, and social behavior. We argue, however, that the search for evolved psychological mechanisms that adequately account for either the transmission of psychological entities (i.e., emotions, intentions, ideas, behaviors, etc.) across generations or the current existence of such entities cannot in principle succeed because evolutionary social science theorists have fundamentally mistaken their metaphors for mechanisms.

SUMMARY This article argues that anthropological theories and strategies can inform the production of an ethnographic text without being or becoming the primary foci of the text. By considering the unorthodox discursive strategies of three ethnographies and one ethnographic novel—Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land (1992), Robert Murphy's The Body Silent (1990), Paul Rabinow's Making PCR (1996), and Laura Bohannan's Return to Laughter (1964)—I suggest that ethnographers need not always explicitly articulate their theoretical constructs to deploy those constructs in their work, and that the rhetorical mode of narration may be uniquely serviceable to this aim. [narrative, rhetorical modes, literary ethnography, critical pedagogy, situated epistemologies, philosophy of social science]

Alexis de Tocqueville, the First Social Scientist. By Jon Elster. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 212p. $80.00 cloth, $22.99 paper.Alexis de Tocqueville is surely one of the most widely cited, discussed, and celebrated political theorists in the world. Jon Elster's book, Alexis de Tocqueville: the First Social Scientist proceeds from a provocative premise: that Tocqueville's major works were lacking in “system” and were “hugely incoherent,” and that Tocqeuville himself “was not a major political thinker” (xi). Elster argues that instead Tocqueville ought to be viewed as a penetrating historical sociologist and an exemplary social scientist who might well be considered the first true social scientist. Elster's argument is important for at least two reasons: first, because it offers a striking and challenging reading of Tocqueville; and second, because it expands on Elster's own contributions in the philosophy of social science, and develops interesting understandings of “causal mechanisms,” methodological individualism, and social explanation more generally. As Elster writes in his Introduction, “the main task of this book is to argue for the relevance of Tocqueville for social science in the twenty-first century (p. 5).” The purpose of this Perspectives symposium is to assess Elster's argument in broad terms. What are the strengths and limits of Elster's reading of Tocqueville? How ought we to assess Elster's understanding of Tocqueville's deficiencies as a “political theorist?” What is the relevance of Tocqueville for contemporary social science? And, most importantly, what are the challenges and possible trajectories facing social science in the twenty-first century, and to what extent does Elster's essay point us in the right direction?—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

The paper begins by outlining the approaches to the development of a philosophy of social science in the work of Bourdieu, Passeron, and Habermas. The discussion of the positions of Comte and Mill which follows is an historical case-study of the tensions between competing stances adopted in the 1960s — between the tendency to formulate a logic of the social sciences and the tendency to ground a philosophy of social science in ontology or in the socio-political conditions of its production. The method adopted to compare the contributions to the philosophy of social science made by Comte and Mill displays sympathy with Bourdieu’s inclination to analyse the social conditions for the genesis of theory. The paper first considers comparatively the contexts in France and England for the emergence of social science and philosophy about social science. It then examines separately the developments of the projects of Comte and Mill before turning to an articulation of the contrasts between their positions, focusing on aspects of their correspondence as subsequently published and introduced by Lévy-Bruhl. The purpose of the paper is to raise the general question whether international intellectual exchange in relation to the analysis of society can occur within a universal discourse possessing a priori validity or through socio-cultural exchanges which assist the construction of universality through the mutual recognition of difference.

The dialogue re-presented in this article is intended to foster mutual engagement—and opportunity for learning—across different perspectives on research within the education research community. Participants in the dialogue each addressed the following questions: (1) What are the touchstones by which you judge quality or rigor in education research (for a single study, a set of studies, or a “field” or community of researchers in dialogue)? What is your chief concern or fear that the touchstones guard against? (2) Where do you see challenges to your perspective in the perspectives of other members of the panel? How might your perspective evolve to respond to those challenges? Given all of this, what are the implications for the preparation of education researchers? Opening and closing comments set the dialogue in historical context, highlight issues raised, and suggest next steps for collaborative learning from the diversity of perspectives in our field.

I would like to thank Brendan Hogan and the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy for organising a session around my book at the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association (Pacific Division) in San Francisco in 2007. The articles in this symposium are revisions of the contributions to that session. My book fits the agenda of the society in that it 'advances' a position which is at least partly indebted to American pragmatism. It is also, to a lesser extent, indebted to Gadamer's hermeneutics, but the influence of neo-pragmatism looms large. This does not mean, however, that my position is compatible with classical pragmatism, and indeed some of the contributors to this symposium claim, rightly I think, that my position is in some respects at odds with that of Dewey's. Before I deal with the various criticisms, it might be appropriate to put my pragmatist-inspired proposal in the context of my own intellectual trajectory in order to make sense of the rationale of the proposal and explain its distinctiveness. Unlike a substantial number of philosophers of social science, I was trained not just in philosophy but also in a social science, have actually carried out social research, am based in a sociology department and teach in an interdisciplinary social and political sciencepr programme. This has given my work in the philosophy of social science quite a distinctive angle in comparison to the armchair philosophy of social science that is prevalent these days. Whereas the content of philosophy of social science used to be tied to the emergence and establishment of new social scientific disciplines like sociology (Baert and Dominguez Rubio 2009), it has in the course of the twentieth century become an increasingly autonomous intellectual enterprise. I have been particularly struck by how generations of philosophers of social science

Many, and perhaps most, American philosophers will, if pressed, say that they are pragmatists. What they typically mean by this is that they think there is some class of philosophical questions that can't be answered philosophically. If you don't think that in the end philosophical arguments can possibly settle metaphysical questions, pragmatism is an appealing response. Pragmatism becomes a kind of default position which one reverts to when one removes a topic from the list of topics that can be reasonably addressed using philosophical methods. When Richard Rorty characterized himself as a pragmatist, he meant that he was in favor of removing topics from philosophy on a wholesale basis, which implied for him the end of philosophy at least as traditionally conceived. Philosophical students of pragmatism weren't very happy with this formulation, not so much for its conclusions, but because it omitted the content of the default that John Dewey himself had in mind, namely something like the scientific method, or the scientific method understood and generalized as something like an experimental approach (Dewey 1946, p. 179). The people who thought Rorty had travestied pragmatism focused, correctly, on the difference in their attitudes toward science. Patrick Baert has written a very interesting textbook on the philosophy of social science which winds up embracing at least the term pragmatism and reflecting on Rorty in a way that arrives at a novel position. As his concluding argument is the most original part of the book and the one that is most relevant in this setting, I shall confine my comments to the question of what both a pragmatist approach to social science and to a "philosophy" of social science might be, and further confine it to the Deweyan and Rortyian variations on this general theme.

In a recent paper on realism and pragmatism published in this journal, Osmo Kivinen and Tero Piiroinen have been pleading for more methodological work in the philosophy of the social sciences—refining the conceptual tools of social scientists—and less philosophically ontological theories. Following this de-ontologizing approach, we scrutinize the debates on social explanation and contribute to the development of a pragmatic social science methodology. Analyzing four classic debates concerning explanation in the social sciences, we propose to shift the debate away from (a) the ontologizing defenses of forms of social explanation, and (b) a winner-takes-all-approach. Instead, we advocate (c) a pragmatic approach towards social explanation, elaborating a rigorous framework for explanatory pluralism detached from the debates on social ontology.

The vast majority of contemporary social scientists have distanced themselves from moral reflection and the academic disciplines that engage in it. Throughout his long career Philip Selznick took a different path, engaging deeply with the moral content of the concepts he employed. This paper argues that he had good reasons to do so. Value neutrality in social research can fatally sever inquiry’s connection to the practical concerns that originally motivated it, and it can distort our understanding of those concerns by recasting them in a scientific mold. To make this case I draw from a long tradition of philosophical thought about the relationship between facts and values, and I illustrate it by examining the limitations of recent social science research about procedural justice in organizations and the order maintenance function of the police.

Charles Taylor is a Canadian philosopher best known for his contributions in the areas of political philosophy, philosophy of social science, and history of Western Modernity. Taylor has, due to his willingness to account for dimensions of human experience beyond natural science, along with his emphasis on how ideas shape history, and thus that history and philosophy are deeply intertwined, been linked to the philosophical tradition of Idealism.1 However, in his attempt to account for the historical developments of concepts and notions such as “the self” or “secularity,” Taylor seeks to balance between what he refers to as a “vulgar Marxist” materialism, that focuses solely on structural and material explanations and which tends to “bypass human motivations all together,” and on the other hand, a “vulgar Hegelian” view, in which ideas are seen as sufficient to explain the cases behind historical developments.2 Rejecting these two extremes, Taylor seeks to account for how ideas are “embedded in practices.”3 Taylor here includes practices at all levels of human social life, such as family, village, national politics, rituals of religious communities, and argues that “ideas articulate practices as patterns of dos and don’ts.”4

This essay explores of the relationship between religion and science using Max Weber's insights into the philosophy of social science, C. S. Peirce's philosophy of religion and the Qur’anic treatment of material reality. The Weber-Peirce-Qur’an conversation opens up the possibility of a (social) scientific affirmation of religion and a religious affirmation of science. Scriptural Reasoning (SR) has already demonstrated that it is capable of creating “mutual ground” between the different religious traditions. This exploration of the exchange between SR and the social sciences suggests that SR has the potential of contributing to the creation of mutual ground between the religious traditions and the “secular” academy.

The aim of this article is to argue for a conception of critical social science based on the model of constitutive rules. The author argues that this model is pragmatically superior to those models that employ notions like “illusion” and “ ideology,” as it does not demand a specification of the “real (but hidden) interests” of social actors.

The article reflects on the possibility of a social science that aims at self-referential knowledge-acquisition. This form of social research explores and questions deep-seated presuppositions prevalent in contemporary culture and strives to become aware of other forms of life. This view of social sciences, therefore, is perfectly in line with the pragmatist perspective that language and knowledge, rather than acts of representation, allow people to increase the scope of human possibilities. Various forms of social research, in a wide range of disciplines, have already explored this self-referential knowledge: for instance, genealogical history and sociology, post-processual archaeology and the critical turn in anthropology. The article locates this self-referential knowledge within the context of contemporary American pragmatism (e.g. Rorty, Bernstein). It is argued that this type of knowledge ties in with the radical tradition in neo-pragmatism, in particular its anti-foundationalist notion of critique.

The four sections of this article are reactions to a few interconnected problems that Mario Bunge addresses in his The Sociology-Philosophy Connection, which can be seen as a continuation and summary of his two recent major volumes Finding Philosophy in Social Science and Social Science under Debate: A Philosophical Perspective. Bunge’s contribution to the philosophy of the social sciences has been sufficiently acclaimed. (See in particular two special issues of this journal dedicated to his social philosophy: “Systems and Mechanisms. A Symposium on Mario Bunge’s Philosophy of Social Science,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 34, nos. 2 and 3.) The author discusses therefore only those solutions in Bunge’s book that seem most problematic, namely, Bunge’s proposal to expel charlatans from universities; his treatment of social laws; his notions of mechanisms, “mechanismic explanation,” and systemism; and his reading of Popper’s social philosophy.

This article addresses three main issues. First, it argues that David Laitin, in a misguided critique of Bent Flyvbjerg’s book Making Social Science Matter for being a surrogate manifesto for Perestroika, misrepresents the book in the extreme. Second, the article argues that Laitin’s claim that political science may become normal, predictive science in the natural science sense is unfounded; the claim is a dead end that perestroikans try to get beyond. Finally, the article proposes that political scientists substitute phronesis for episteme and thereby avoid the trap of emulating natural science. By doing so, political scientists may arrive at social science that is strong where natural science is weak: in the reflexive analysis and discussion of values and interests aimed at praxis, which is the prerequisite for an enlightened political, economic, and cultural development in any society.

This empirical study examines how the methodological training, attitudes and perceptions of tourism researchers are shaping the form and content of the “Knowledge-Based Platform” in tourism studies. Data was gathered electronically with the help of e-mail and an on-line web survey. The trends observed point out a number of institutional and structural barriers to the acceptance of qualitative research as a legitimate mode of inquiry. These relate to tenure, journal article publication, agency funding and obtaining academic positions based on qualitative dissertations. Additionally, the study indicates two graduate program-related conditions that inhibit effective social inquiry: (1) insufficient training to produce good qualitative researchers, and (2) inadequate program support for training students to recognize the philosophical/methodological issues that shape their own research approaches and analyses. Overall, results suggest that tourism research still aspires to being primarily (post)posit...

Recent interest on the part of criminologists in the “faith factor” has made possible a contemporary argument for faith-based interventions in crime prevention: if faith “works,” then government should support faith-based initiatives because in doing so, government is not endorsing religion, but science. Drawing on the ideas of Karl Popper, Michael Polanyi, and others, this essay reviews this argument within the framework of the philosophy of social science. The discussion reviews such concepts of falsification, structural causality, objectivity, and evidence-based policy making to affirm the place of both faith and science in public life.

Human Studies is ajournai of philosophy and the social sciences, and it has been adopted as the official journal of the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences (SPHS). It also serves as ethnomethodology's unofficial journal. Ethnomethodology is affiliated with no single professional society or academic journal, but Human Studies has been the most consistent outlet for ethnomethodological articles and special issues. As ethnomethodology's unofficial journal, Human Studies has enabled neo? phytes as well more prominent scholars to have an outlet for ethnometh? odological research, and it has also published several special theme issues on ethnomethodology in general (Coulter, 1980; Psathas, 1995), and specific topics such as interaction and language use (Button et al., 1986), representa? tion in scientific practice (Lynch and Woolgar, 1988), and ethnomethodology and conversation analysis in Japan (Psathas and Nasu, 1999). Because of its explicit attention to the philosophy of social science, Human Studies has given visibility to a style of ethnomethodological research characterized by a radi? cal treatment of foundational "philosophical" issues and debates. Consistent with the stated aims of Human Studies, ethnomethodology advances "the dia? logue between philosophy and the human sciences." Ethnomethodology is not a philosophy of social science, but is, rather, an empirical research program that investigates recurrent topics that have had long-standing interest in philosophy and social theory. These topics include action, argument, meaning, knowledge, perception, description, objectivity, and rationality, among many others. This empirical research program takes lessons from critiques by Peter Winch and other philosophers who criticize empiricist social science programs that turn ordinary linguistic concepts into "variables" and "factors" (Winch, 1958). In this brief essay, I hope to clarify what is distinctive about a "philosophical" style of ethnomethodology that owes a great deal to Human Studies, and specifically to founding editor George Psathas, whose combined interests in phenomenological sociology and ethno? methodology have left an indelible mark on the journal's quarter-century. I shall start with the familiar question: What is ethnomethodology? All too frequently, those of us who speak of (and for) ethnomethodology are asked to define the word, and it is tempting to challenge the recurrent call for d?fini

An observed discrepancy in the behaviour of Economics students and non-Economics ones in game theoretical experiments indicates that the former are more selfish. The prevalent explanation for this is that they are 'born economists' and thus self-select themselves into the discipline. This belief is supported by the observation that Econ-students already differ from non-Econ ones at the very beginning of the their training. We argue that the difference can also be explained by second-order expectations afforded by the economist's stereotype and by the adherence to such stereotype.