Explanation in Social Science. Robert BrownThe Problem of Social-Scientific Knowledge. William P. McEwen

Ethics ◽  
1964 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 304-307
Author(s):  
Cecil Miller
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Social Scientific

Comparative Area Studies

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Comparative Research ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Mixed Method Research ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
Context Sensitive ◽  
Field Of Vision ◽  
Social Scientific

Area studies scholarship has been indispensable for the development of social scientific knowledge. However, it risks becoming marginalized without more concerted efforts to demonstrate its relevance for contemporary social science. This volume showcases comparative area studies (CAS). CAS incorporates familiar elements from past comparative research but draws them together into a strategy for balancing context-sensitive understandings of diverse locales with cross-regional qualitative research on questions that matter to social science disciplines. Part II considers the epistemological, methodological, and practical concerns driving CAS as well as the pitfalls of doing cross-regional comparative research. The chapters emphasize the distinctive gains from extending one’s field of vision beyond one’s primary area of expertise (and the costs of not doing so). Part III presents studies that illustrate how creatively designed contextualized comparisons of cases from different regions generate novel insights into a range of substantive topics—from protests and rebellions to anti-corruption campaigns, resource booms, and the organization of production. The final chapter recasts the significance of CAS in light of current debates on social science methods, suggesting that cross-regional contextualized comparison can partly compensate for some of the blind spots in the most common forms of qualitative and mixed-method research. The volume demonstrates that the pursuit of area expertise and the search for social scientific knowledge need not be a zero-sum game as long as we make conscious efforts to connect scholarly debates unfolding within separate area studies communities to each other and to the theoretical problems driving social science research.

scholarly journals Studying Your Own Country: Social Scientific Knowledge for Our Times and Places

2014 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 647-666 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alain Noël
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
International Perspective ◽  
Outcome Studies ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Usable Knowledge ◽  
Crowd Out ◽  
Social Scientific

AbstractPolitical science is both a generalizing and an anchored, nationally defined, discipline. Too often, the first perspective tends to crowd out the latter, because it appears more prestigious, objective, or scientific. Behind the international/national dichotomy, there are indeed rival conceptions of social science and important ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions. This article discusses these assumptions and stresses the critical contribution of idiographic, single-outcome studies, the importance of producing relevant, usable knowledge and the distinctive implications of studying one's own country, where a scholar is also a citizen, involved in more encompassing national conversations. The aim is not to reject the generalizing, international perspective, or even the comparative approach, but rather to reaffirm the importance of maintaining as well, and in fact celebrating, the production of social scientific knowledge directly relevant for our own times and places.

scholarly journals ‘Fighting Science with Social Science: Activist Scholarship in an International Resistance Project’

2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Stevienna de Saille
Keyword(s):  
Genetic Engineering ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Analytic Framework ◽  
International Network ◽  
Emergent Technologies ◽  
Social Scientific

This paper draws on a socio-historic case study of the Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering (FINRRAGE) in order to consider the ways in which activists create and develop knowledge in movements around complex emergent technologies. Using documentary and interview data, and an analytic framework drawn from Eyerman and Jamison's cognitive praxis paradigm, the paper outlines certain conditions under which activists may be able to create both social and social scientific knowledge in support of their claims. The paradigm itself is also interrogated, and suggestions made for extending and refining the framework through incorporation of theories of knowledge drawn from science and technology studies.

Feudal Europe, 800–1300: communal discourse and conflictual practices

1992 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 427-466 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus Fischer
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Social Science ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Structural Theory ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Fundamental Significance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Scientific Argument

The discipline of international relations faces a new debate of fundamental significance. After the realist challenge to the pervasive idealism of the interwar years and the social scientific argument against realism in the late 1950s, it is now the turn of critical theorists to dispute the established paradigms of international politics, having been remarkably successful in several other fields of social inquiry. In essence, critical theorists claim that all social reality is subject to historical change, that a normative discourse of understandings and values entails corresponding practices, and that social theory must include interpretation and dialectical critique. In international relations, this approach particularly critiques the ahistorical, scientific, and materialist conceptions offered by neorealists. Traditional realists, by contrast, find a little more sympathy in the eyes of critical theorists because they join them in their rejection of social science and structural theory. With regard to liberal institutionalism, critical theorists are naturally sympathetic to its communitarian component while castigating its utilitarian strand as the accomplice of neorealism. Overall, the advent of critical theory will thus focus the field of international relations on its “interparadigm debate” with neorealism.

Why they shared: recovering early arguments for sharing social scientific data

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-119
Author(s):  
Emily Hauptmann
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Data Sharing ◽  
Financial Stability ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Scientific Data ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Ethical Imperative ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
The University ◽  
University Consortium

ArgumentMost social scientists today think of data sharing as an ethical imperative essential to making social science more transparent, verifiable, and replicable. But what moved the architects of some of the U.S.’s first university-based social scientific research institutions, the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research (ISR), and its spin-off, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), to share their data? Relying primarily on archived records, unpublished personal papers, and oral histories, I show that Angus Campbell, Warren Miller, Philip Converse, and others understood sharing data not as an ethical imperative intrinsic to social science but as a useful means to the diverse ends of financial stability, scholarly and institutional autonomy, and epistemological reproduction. I conclude that data sharing must be evaluated not only on the basis of the scientific ideals its supporters affirm, but also on the professional objectives it serves.

Considering Finite Provinces of Meaning

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 155-170
Author(s):  
Jerry Williams ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Scientific Concepts ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Finite Provinces Of Meaning ◽  
Social Scientific

This essay considers social science as a finite province of meaning. It is argued that teasing out common-sense meanings from social scientific conceptions is difficult because the meanings of scientific concepts are often veiled in life-worldly taken-for-grantedness. If social scientists have successfully created a scientific province of meaning, attempts to communicate findings outside of this reduced sphere of science should be somewhat problematic.

scholarly journals Political Disagreement and Minimal Epistocracy

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam F. Gibbons
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
Body Of Knowledge ◽  
Political Disagreement ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Crucial Assumption

Despite their many virtues, democracies suffer from well-known problems with high levels of voter ignorance. Such ignorance, one might think, leads democracies to occasionally produce bad outcomes. Proponents of epistocracy claim that allocating comparatively greater amounts of political power to citizens who possess more politically relevant knowledge may help us to mitigate the bad effects of voter ignorance. In a recent paper, Julian Reiss challenges a crucial assumption underlying the case for epistocracy. Central to any defence of epistocracy is the conviction that we can identify a body of political knowledge which, when possessed in greater amounts by voters, leads to substantively better outcomes than when voters lack such knowledge. But it is not possible to identify such a body of knowledge. There is simply far too much controversy in the social sciences, and this controversy prevents us from definitively saying of some citizens that they possess more politically relevant knowledge than others. Call this the Argument from Political Disagreement. In this paper I respond to the Argument from Political Disagreement. First, I argue that Reiss conflates social-scientific knowledge with politically relevant knowledge. Even if there were no uncontroversial social-scientific knowledge, there is much uncontroversial politically relevant knowledge. Second, I argue that there is some uncontroversial social-scientific knowledge. While Reiss correctly notes that there is much controversy in the social sciences, not every issue is controversial. The non-social-scientific politically relevant knowledge and the uncontroversial social-scientific knowledge together constitute the minimal body of knowledge which epistocrats need to make their case. 

‘Who Wants to be a Social Engineer? A commentary on David Blunkett's Speech to the ESRC’

2000 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Hodgkinson
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Policy Process ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Politics And Government ◽  
The Government ◽  
Education And Employment ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
The Uk

This article is a response to a speech addressed to the Economic and Social Research Council which was made, in February this year, by the UK Secretary of State for Education and Employment, David Blunkett. The speech was entitled ‘Influence or Irrelevance: can social science improve government?’ . Blunkett's programme for engaging social science in the policy process is far from unique and many of the arguments have been heard before. However, the curiosity of the speech lies in the fact that the conception of social science which Blunkett advocates mirrors the approach New Labour itself has to politics and government. This raises some rather interesting difficulties for social scientists. How do we engage in a debate about the role of social scientific research in the policy process when our own conception of the discipline may be radically at odds with that of the government? Furthermore, New Labour's particular conception of the relationship between social and policy-making means that we not only have to contest their notion of what it is we do, but also challenge their conception of the policy process. We cannot ignore this engagement, even if we wanted to. The challenge is to address it and to do so, moreover, in terms which Blunkett might understand. This article is an attempt to start this process.

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