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Paul Feyerabend’s essay “Against method” (1975) is rarely mentioned when scientists try to contextualise and justify their research projects. Or at least I have never come across this piece as a positive reference in a proposal submitted to me for review nor have I ever heard it referred to positively in a talk. Well, except if the writer or speaker is intent on making a difference, polemically of course. Along lines such as these: No! Of course our outstanding study doesn’t believe that “anything goes”, but adheres instead to correct methodological awareness! Here order prevails, so please just disburse those third-party funds, if you wouldn’t mind!

Now that we know what proper phenomenology is, the next task is to show that proper phenomenology conforms to the idea of genuine social science as the pursuit of nonpractical knowledge about “man” in situation and therefore capable of being a philosophy of social science. But in order to say that phenomenology is social scientific we also need to be able to say what this idea of genuine social science is in a more formal sense. This requires we give some formal expression to the “scientific way of thinking”. In following the argument, of the previous chapter, this chapter will develop the notion of genuine social science as a particular type of cognitive style and province of meaning. To discern this eidetic structure, I will clarify and amend Alfred Schutz’s postulates of social science. Schutz never stated all the postulates in a single essay, or at the least, never in a way which kept terminology consistent. Thus, at various times different postulates were referred to by different names. Amendments are necessary in order to avoid confusions that have since arisen with some of the more general terminology that Schutz relies upon.

Scholars have sometimes argued that we should conceive of social research as a form of moral inquiry, at least in part, but none have made clear exactly how and why observational research can make a distinctive contribution to moral insight. Returning to an era before the modern distinction between social science and the humanities became entrenched, this article argues that Adam Smith provided a clear and forceful rationale for the moral role of social research, especially history. Smith believed that moral understanding relies on emotional reactions to richly described cases, preferably where our own interests are not at stake. These meditations on particular cases, in turn, provide the basis for moral generalizations that can inform future encounters with particular cases. This perspective led Smith (along with his friend David Hume) to the view that historical writing makes a more important contribution to moral understanding than abstract philosophy does. This article reconstructs Smith’s arguments about the role of empirical observation in cultivating moral sensibility in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, his Lectures on Jurisprudence, and his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. It then connects his argument to contemporary ideas about the nature of moral understanding in philosophy and cognitive science.

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.

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was a British-Austrian philosopher, widely considered one of most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. His early work played a significant role in twentieth-century logical positivism while his later work has been a main methodological influence in the works of key social theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu, Jürgen Habermas, and Anthony Giddens. The entry briefly describes Wittgenstein's philosophy and summarizes his overall influence within social theory.

Much of the excitement in social media analytics revolves around, a) capturing large-scale collections of naturally-occurring talk, b) repurposing them as data, and, c) finding ways to speak sociologically about them. Researchers have raised concerns over the use of social media data in research (for example, boyd and Crawford, 2012; Housley et al, 2014; Tinati et al, 2014), exploring the ontological and epistemological grounding of the emerging field. We contribute to this debate by drawing on Wittgensteinian philosophy to elucidate hitherto neglected aspects; namely that it is not just social scientists who are in the business of analysing social media, but users themselves. We explore how mainstream social media analytics research (1) overinflates the importance of sociological theories, concepts and methodologies (which do not typically feature in the accounts of social media users), (2) downplays the extent to which social media platforms already exhibit order prior to any sociological accounting of them, and, (3) thereby produces findings which explain social scientific perspectives rather than the phenomena themselves. We reformulate the ontological and epistemological basis of social media analytics research from a Wittgensteinian perspective concerned with what it makes sense to say about social media, as members of society and as researchers studying those members. Such a project aims to explore social media users’ language as a practice embedded within the context of social life and online communication. This reflects the everyday use of language as an evolving toolkit for undertaking social interaction, pointing towards an alternative conception of social media analytics.

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.

The sociology of cognition could serve as a more effective bridge between sociology and other disciplines, and more of a two-way thoroughfare, if we would consider doing the following two things, which we are already doing here and there. First, we need to take a stand in philosophy of social science debates. Second, we need to show how what we do contributes to sociological methods, and not only say that what we do contributes to sociological theory, however fundamental that contribution may be.

Philosophy of social science, properly conceived, has something to offer practicing social scientists. Social scientists cannot help but have some philosophy of social science implicitly involved in their research, and to avoid blind alleys, it is best to be explicit and critically aware of what that philosophy is and its merits. Philosophy of the social sciences, in turn, cannot be done without close engagement with social research. The article outlines some developments in postpositivist philosophy of science and their implications for philosophy of social science. This general perspective is then applied to debates in the social sciences over the nature of causation, the place of mechanisms in social research and the legitimacy of purely macrosociological explanations, qualitative vs. quantitative research, observational vs. experimental evidence, and questions about individualism vs. holism in social explanation. A filosofia das ciências sociais, concebida da maneira adequada, tem algo a oferecer aos que praticam as ciências sociais. Os cientistas sociais adotam em suas pesquisas, ainda que de forma implícita, alguma filosofia de sua ciência. Para evitar impasses, é melhor explicitar essa filosofia e ser criticamente consciente dos seus méritos. A filosofia das ciências sociais, por sua vez, não pode ser praticada sem um envolvimento íntimo com a pesquisa social. O artigo esboça alguns desenvolvimentos da filosofia da ciência pós-positivista e suas implicações para a filosofia das ciências sociais. Essa perspectiva geral é então aplicada a alguns debates das ciências sociais: a natureza da causalidade; o lugar dos mecanismos na pesquisa social e da legitimidade de explicações puramente macrossociológicas; a distinção entre pesquisa qualitativa e quantitativa; a distinção entre evidência observacional e evidência experimental; a polêmica entre o individualismo e o holismo metodológicos na explicação sociológica.

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.

Economics is not simply about representing reality; it is also about shaping it, an approach encapsulated in Donald MacKenzie’s aphorism that economics is best conceived as an “engine, not as a camera” (MacKenzie and Millo (Am J Sociol 109(1):107–145, 2003). The making and application of economic theories and models contribute actively and intentionally towards the making of our social world, by encouraging, guiding and legitimizing actions and decisions, or discouraging others, and by steering them in certain directions. It follows that economists do not simply draw maps of the economic territory within their compass: they are not straightforwardly the cartographers of the economy, and cannot be seen as the disinterested observers that they commonly represent themselves to be, and indeed are often thought of as. Their theoretical work has or aims at practical consequences for the economy, and indeed for society at large, and their interests and influence are thus by no means confined to academia alone. This article calls for a discussion of the ethical responsibilities of economists, and of economics, and challenges the discipline properly to assume those responsibilities; and it concludes by considering the key questions—what makes a ‘good’ economic model; and what criteria should be used to distinguish the good models, and the ‘good ways’ of handling models and their results, from the bad ones. As far as epistemology, the methodology of research programmes and the relation of theory and (social) practice are concerned, the insights of mainly von Hayek (Br J Philos Sci 6(23):209–225, 1955, The pretence of knowledge. Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, 1974; Individualism and economic order, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp 33–56, 1980a; Individualism and economic order, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp 57–76, 1980b; The theory of complex phenomena. Readings in the philosophy of social science, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1994) and Popper (e.g. The myth of the framework: in defence of science and rationality, Routledge, New York 1994a; Models, instruments, and truth. The status of the rationality principle in the social sciences, pp 154–184, 1994b) provide the background of my discussion of the mentioned issues.

Question runs as follows: is an inquiry a preliminary step to a theory, or does a theory (evidently, found by chance, or by luck) give rise to an inquiry? This is a logical circle, or maybe an ellipsis. Or maybe this circle/ellipsis is a hermeneutical one. In this case it is hard to distinguish between a source of scientific thought and its aim, or the fruits of it. Be it a logical or hermeneutical circle of the current of human thought and activity, in both cases it is an important problem for science and for a philosophy of science reflecting it. I argue that, among all sciences, social sciences and humanities, making use of interpretation rather than of demonstration, have better chance to have the circle/ellipsis torn in order to solve the problem of passing from theory/inquiry to practice. It is decades-long positivistic tradition to think of a scientific theory as of a physical theory considered as an etalon for all scientific knowledge. Even epistemology, social it itself, tends to be constructed as a physical theory. The same could be said about philosophy of science. Recently, however, in Russian philosophy of science there appeared a philosophy of post-theoretical thinking. Its author is V.I. Przhilenskiy. It can well be treated as an inquiry following and negating a modern theory of knowledge (i.e., epistemology and analytical philosophy as its branch) – which in its turn had its origin in general gnoseology as an inquiry. Following and negating general gnoseology as something non-theoretical in the positivistic view, theory of knowledge is now being replaced in philosophy of social sciences by an inquiry in a form of post-theoretical thinking. This, indeed, is not merely a circle, but a spiral – a Hegelian emblem of development.

This book succeeds in being nice all round. Its means are slight distortions of issues in dispute. A preferable approach would be to inform readers of the sharp rifts in the field and their ramifications and then to challenge beginners to think about how to deal with the situation.

The Aristotelian concept of phronesis or practical wisdom has played a prominent role in the long and deep wake of the Perestroika controversy in political science, where a diverse group of practitioners rallied in opposition to the perceived hegemony of quantitative methods in the discipline. As scholars like Bent Flyvbjerg have proposed the contours of a post-Perestroikan social science, political scientists and theorists have taken his use of the idea of practical wisdom to herald the dawning of a new social science, less beholden to notions of method. This paper examines the post-Perestroikan appropriation of Aristotle using Hans-Georg Gadamer’s interpretation of phronesis as a starting point. Viewed from this vantage, contemporary uses of phronesis seem less like the foundations for a new social science, and more like a new spin on the old arguments about method that have characterized social science since the mid-1800s.

Philosophy of social science is a branch of philosophy where relations between philosophy and social sciences are traced and investigated. The main functions of philosophy of social science are: to work out social ontology, methodology and metatheory of social science.

The relevance to decision research of recent advances in the philosophy of social science is considered. The critical realism of Roy Bhaskar argues for the identification of contextually contingent explanatory mechanisms at multiple levels based on concepts grounded in intersubjectively shared reality. Using examples from the author’s and other’s research on the psychology of decisions involving risk and uncertainty, this paper explores the implications of taking a critical realist approach. It is argued that critical realism has the potential to advance and unify disparate experimental and naturalistic lines of research. Furthermore, a diverse range of experimental, process-tracing and observational methods can play important complementary roles in developing fruitful critical realist explanations of decisions involving risk and uncertainty

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.

A value judgment says what is good or bad, and value-free social science simply means social science free of value judgments. Yet many sociologists regard value-free social science as undesirable or impossible and readily make value judgments in the name of sociology. Often they display confusion about such matters as the meaning of value-free social science, value judgments internal and external to social science, value judgments as a subject of social science, the relevance of objectivity for value-free social science, and the difference between the human significance of social science and value-free social science. But why so many sociologists are so value-involved - and generally so unscientific - is sociologically understandable: The closest and most distant subjects attract the least scientific ideas. And during the past century sociologists have become increasingly close to their human subject. The debate about value-free social science is also part of an epistemological counterrevolution of humanists (including many sociologists) against the more scientific social scientists who invaded and threatened to expropriate the human subject during the past century.

In 1987, George Soros introduced his concepts of reflexivity and fallibility and has further developed and applied these concepts over subsequent decades. This paper attempts to build on Soros's framework, provide his concepts with a more precise definition, and put them in the context of recent thinking on complex adaptive systems. The paper proposes that systems can be classified along a ‘spectrum of complexity’ and that under specific conditions not only social systems but also natural and artificial systems can be considered ‘complex reflexive.’ The epistemological challenges associated with scientifically understanding a phenomenon stem not from whether its domain is social, natural, or artificial, but where it falls along this spectrum. Reflexive systems present particular challenges; however, evolutionary model-dependent realism provides a bridge between Soros and Popper and a potential path forward for economics.

Inspired by Louis Althusser’s polemic that Marxism is a science and not a philosophy, we enquire about the nature of this ‘scientificity’ of Marxism. The result is a clarification that Marxism is a social theory within the discourse of hermeneutics. Drawing on William Dilthey’s categorisation of human science as Geisteswissenschaft , which essentially is an interpretive science when differentiated from Naturwissenschaft , we point out that Marxism should be understood and used as a socio-hermeneutic theory. We highlight that at the pinnacle of his intellectual development that resulted in Das Kapital , Marx produced a scientific principle for interpreting historical social formations and the human condition, particularly during the capitalist epoch. The description of the scientific character of this hermeneutic principle, set against what Althusser attempted, and motivated by the quest for a contemporaneous application of Marxist theory, is the mission of our paper. It is a contribution to the Philosophy of Social Science. South African Journal of Philosophy 2013, 32(2): 187–196

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.

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.

One of the great difficulties about considering New Atheism is that many of the names associated with the movement have come from the scholarly ranks. This raises some difficult questions for how it is we, as academics and scholars, respond to them and treat their treatment of religion. In this reflective final chapter I look back over the previous contributions to the volume from the perspective of philosophy of social science—positioning myself halfway between our philosophical contributors and our social scientific contributors. Looking at what it is the New Atheists themselves might be trying to achieve, I investigate the ways in which we have responded to them and what this might say about us as a “scholarly group”. Ultimately the fact that some of the New Atheists come from the ranks and engage so willingly with the general public we must address the fundamental questions of what it is to do philosophy and what it is to do social science.

Wilhelm Dilthey is, famously, an epistemological pioneer for a second, ‘human’ kind of science that ‘understands’ life as we live it, instead of ‘explaining’ things as we observe them. Even today, he is usually cited for his role in the Erklaren–Verstehen debate. My article, however, follows Heidegger's suggestion that we make the existence of the debate itself the problem. Whether there are different sorts of entity, different reasons for studying them and different means for doing so – such issues raise questions about science itself, not just about how to do it better. Moreover, what sort of philosopher is competent to address such questions? Heidegger argues that Dilthey's later writings intimate that it must be one who thinks from the ‘standpoint of (historical) life itself.’ This issue, says Heidegger, is ‘alive’ in Dilthey but is continually short-circuited by his very traditional plan for a ‘Critique of Historical Reason.’ Dilthey's unsuccessful struggles to produce this Critique are his gift to u...

Now in its second edition, this comprehensive textbook offers an exceptionally accessible yet in-depth introduction to the philosophy of social science. Students with no previous knowledge will find themselves taken on an engaging philosophical journey: the book’s unique dialogue format anticipates their most frequently asked questions and provides clear explanations of specialised terminology and essential contextualisation of contemporary debates. Encompassing both traditional and contemporary perspectives, the book explores the questions and debates raised by all the major theoretical positions in the philosophy of social science, including positivism, empiricism, rationalism, hermeneutics, feminist epistemology, postmodernism and critical realism. The first edition of this book had a Eurocentric bias, as does virtually all other textbooks covering this subject matter. This has been corrected in the second edition and includes a new chapter on the contributions of Islam to philosophy, natural science social science including sociology. The second edition also has a newly written chapter on pragmaticism and neo-pragmaticism, as well as strengthened coverage of hermeneutics, postmodernism and critical realism. The book‘s rich pedagogic support includes: point-by-point summaries introducing the scope of every chapter; discussion questions; further reading lists; and a glossary of key terminology. This excellent textbook is designed to provide every student with a clear understanding of important and complex issues. It is essential reading for all students of philosophy of social science, whether at undergraduate or Masters level and regardless of their disciplinary background.

This part of the book moves from general consideration about educational research to the more specific contributions that philosophy of education can make to the research community. This particular chapter is organised around three different relationships between philosophy and educational research more generally. First it discusses philosophising about educational research, which one might regard as a subspecies of philosophy of social science. Philosophy has a major role in contributing to debates about the epistemological standing of different forms of inquiry, about methodological issues, and hence about methods. It provides an underpinning to debates about research ethics and about the social and political principles that should underpin educational research. Second, philosophical inquiry and philosophical scholarship are themselves among the constituents of educational research. Philosophising about education is itself a form of educational research. Third, I consider in a separate chapter (Chap. 10) the role of philosophy, or the philosopher, in an educational research team, in an interdisciplinary inquiry.

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'.

This article attempts to add a new dimension to the meta-scientific discussion about the status of interpretive enquiry and the boundaries of 'social science'. It argues that while the existing deb...

In this essay, the authors consider the challenge made by two keynote speakers at recent social work research conferences, one in the United States and the other in Europe. Both spoke of a knowledge crisis in social work. Both John Brekke (Society for Social Work and Research) and Peter Sommerfeld (First Annual European Conference for Social Work Research) proposed some version of realism as a solution to the crisis. The authors will deepen the argument for realism, however, by discussing how a critical realist perspective allows us to rethink positivist and conventionalist assumptions about the fact/value relation. Using a critical realist philosophy of social science, the authors discuss how social work has taken up positivism and myriad forms of conventionalism and also identify how practical knowledge gradually loses its place and thus contribute to social work’s ongoing knowledge crisis. The authors then offer a way of thinking about practice. The authors will consider forms of practice knowledge and propose that social work has four kinds that unfold in essentially open systems: discursive, visual, embodied, and liquid systems, and that each of these have both tacit and explicit dimensions. These forms of practice, moreover, are inevitably situated in theory-to-practice gaps (the authors call them phenomenological practice gaps), which are the source of social work’s knowledge crisis. The authors conclude with a discussion of the role of reflexivity in a science of social work.

Utilising critical realist philosophy of social science, this article contends that discourse may be studied as a causal mechanism in the generation of events — and one relationally connected to mechanisms of differing kinds. To do this, it is argued that we should adopt critical discourse analysis rather than the guidance of poststructuralist discourse theory. After establishing the key assumptions of poststructuralist discourse theory, some of the substantive analytical tendencies that secrete are discussed and illustrated through a look at the treatment of humanitarian discourse in the International Relations literature on the nature of Western warfare. The article then places discourse within a critical realist view of the social world. I argue that unlike in poststructuralist discourse theory, with critical realism, discourse can be differentiated from the realm of extra-discursive practice, placed in dialectical relation to this wider realm of social relations, and analysed as a possible causal mechanism in the generation of social phenomena, alongside these other mechanisms, as a way to better determine discourse’s actual effect on events. critical discourse analysis is introduced as offering an amenable methodological tool-kit for studying discourse as conceptualised in this way.

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.

Fifty years ago, social work understood research as depicted by logical positivism and its successors, and an obsolete scientism still held sway. This paper will briefly trace the history of the epistemological debate that has taken place in social work in the last 30 years, which is directly related to the credibility of agency-based research and of qualitative methods as well as to issues in knowledge development about oppressed groups. Contemporary epistemologies--realism and pragmatism--offer frameworks that are compatible with what is needed for practice-relevant research and knowledge development: firm grounding for methodological pluralism, attention to the social and political nature of science, the embrace of theory, and an end to scientism without resort to relativism. If these changes in epistemological thinking can be fully embraced, the twentyfirst century can be a very productive one for agency-based and practice-relevant social work research.

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]

Why should we introduce the notion of ‘analytical sociology’ into the field of sociology, and why should it be linked to the concept of ‘mechanism’? With these two principal questions, Pierre Demeulenaere, Professor of Sociological Theory and Philosophy of the Social Sciences at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, opens his Analytical Sociology and Social Mechanisms, a collection of thirteen papers written by social scientists and philosophers of the social sciences (1). Not every contributor should be considered an analytical sociologist. Rather than being a manifesto either pro or contra analytical sociology and the use of mechanisms, it is an attempt to reflect upon the key issues involved in sociological explanation (3). Even though several chapters raise very interesting points, the overall impression one gets from this book is that analytical sociology fails to redeem its main promise, viz. to add clarity, precision, and conceptual rigor to sociology, especially regarding one of its most central concepts: ‘mechanism’. Analytical sociology is not a new sociological paradigm, but an effort to clarify analytically the basic epistemological, theoretical, and methodological principles underlying any satisfactory way of doing social science (1). It provides an updated version of methodological individualism, often called structural individualism, which combines its predecessor’s basic focus on the individual actors underlying all social phenomena with an updated view of these individuals, including a new theory of action and special attention for the actors’ (social) environment (10–12). One of the central concepts figuring in analytical sociology is ‘social mechanism’: ‘‘Whenever we start explaining ‘why’ something happens, beyond mere description, we are necessarily led to introduce some type of causal linkage of

The purpose of this research was to probe the philosophical beliefs of instructional designers using sound philosophical constructs and quantitative data collection and analysis. We investigated the philosophical and methodological beliefs of instructional designers, including 152 instructional design faculty members and 118 non-faculty professionals. We used the Philosophy of Social Science Inventory, a 52-item questionnaire, to measure 20 beliefs within four categories. We probed four ontological beliefs (ontological realism, ontological relativism, physicalism, and idealism); five epistemological beliefs (epistemological relativism, fallibilism, epistemological objectivity, rationalism, and empiricism); three axiological beliefs (ethical realism, ethical relativism, and valueneutrality in research); and eight methodological beliefs (nomothetic, idiographic and critical methods, scientific naturalism, humanism, and quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods). Our research questions included (a) What are the predominant philosophical and methodological beliefs of instructional designers? (b) Do instructional design faculty and non-faculty instructional designers, identifying with different research methodologies, hold different sets of philosophical beliefs? and (c) What relationships exist between philosophical beliefs and age, gender, ethnicity, level of education, and/or years of service? Overall, the philosophical profile of instructional designers can reasonably be described as pragmatic. Belief characterizations of methodological subgroups (e.g., those identifying with qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods research) generally supported our hypotheses. Although demographic variables (except gender) were not singularly important, our analyses suggest that a combination of ethnicity, gender, research preference, and level of education can be used to predict philosophical and methodological beliefs.