Toward a theory of myth

James Cresswell provides a thoughtful critique of my essay on a theory of myth (Mills) with a specific focus on the nature of theorizing that challenges the dogma of empirical frames of reference, concluding that scientific theories themselves are contemporary myths. Insofar as myth is an attempt to provide a narrative or discourse about phenomena, Cresswell's argument could apply to any theory. But he takes this point further: theory is synonymous with myth. In order to unpack this evocative claim, it may prove useful to revisit how theory and myth relate to the concepts of logos, truth, ontology and identity. In the end, I suggest theory is not myth because theory sets out to describe, interpret and explain phenomena and is scrutinized for its validity, generalizability and applied consequences, while the premises of myth are often historically and culturally presupposed or simply devolve into belief that may or may not be defensible.     

文化、历史中的“民族精神”——陶云逵与中国人类学的德国因素

本文通过民国时期人类学家陶云逵这一个案,来梳理德国“文化”概念经过中国学者的思考和运用进入中国社会科学的历程。作为第一位运用“文化”理论进行实地经验研究的中国学者,陶云逵在实证研究中思考如何保存“文化”自身的神圣性,肯定人的精神价值,对各文化之间如何相互沟通和理解问题展开过深入的讨论。这些讨论不仅在人类学内部有意义,而且构成了人类学、社会学与哲学和历史学对话的可能。本文跟随陶云逵的理论和实证研究脚步,呈现他在文化理论和方法论上的探索,并试图指出,陶云逵对“文化”如何制约“国家”的政治经济权力提出有力的现实和历史证据。     

Falsificationism is not just ‘potential’ falsifiability,but requires ‘actual’ falsification: Social psychology,critical rationalism,and progress in science

Based on an analysis of ten popular introductions to social psychology, we will show that Karl Popper's philosophy of ‘critical rationalism’ so far has had little to no traceable influence on the epistemology and practice of social psychology. If Popper is quoted or mentioned in the textbooks at all, the guiding principle of ‘falsificationism’ is reduced to a mere ‘falsifiability’ and some central elements of critical rationalism are left out – those that are incompatible with positivism and inductivism. Echoing earlier attempts to introduce Popper to social psychology by Paul Meehl and Tom Pettigrew, we will argue that a discussing Popper's ideas in more depth could help social psychology to move forward in view of the ‘crisis of confidence’ (Pashler and Wagenmakers, 2012) that has emerged recently in view of the ‘Stapel affair’ and the reports of failures to replicate social psychological experiments in high‐powered replication attempts.     

The power of directional predictions in psychology

The vast majority of empirical hypotheses in psychology, or in the social sciences more generally, are directional whereas in other sciences, such as the physical sciences, there are more point or narrow-interval empirical hypotheses. Characteristics of theories and auxiliary assumptions play a role in the difference. Given that psychology research strongly features directional predictions, it is important to question the extent to which these provide convincing tests of theories that they are designed to test. The present work aims to provide a nuanced view that considers the complex interaction between the obviousness of directional predictions, the obviousness of the theory from which they derive, and the quality of the auxiliary assumptions that push towards directional predictions. Then, too, there is the related issue of vulnerability of directional predictions to alternative explanations and how to address them.     

Psychological Conflict and Human Nature: The Case of Behaviourism and Cognition*

A reasonable choice between Skinner's and Chomsky's theories requires reference to a conception of human nature. It is explained in detail why this is so, in the context of an analysis of what it is to ‘choose’ a theory. This account helps to explain the unity and coherence of the science, methodology, conception of science, object of scientific inquiry and views towards control of each of Skinner and Chomsky, and thereby explains the chasm which separates the parties to their respective programs. The analysis given implies that, in a precise sense, the theory-choice is implicated in value-judgments.     

Social Representations Theory: A Progressive Research Programme for Social Psychology

The study “Psychoanalysis—its image and its public” intimates that common sense is increasingly informed by science. But common sense asserts its autonomy and, in turn, may affect the trajectory of science. This is a process that leads to many differentiations—in common sense, in scientific innovation and in political and regulatory structures. Bauer and Gaskell's toblerone model of triangles of mediation provided a distillation of their reading of “La Psychanalyse.” Here it was argued that representations are multi‐modal phenomena necessitating the use of multiple methodologies (comparative and longitudinal; qualitative and quantitative). In this paper we briefly summarise these arguments and elaborate ways in which social representation theory can be considered a progressive research programme. “Progressive” because as the theory has developed it has extended the range and depth of its conceptual basis; it provides a new synthesis for the social scientific understanding of the phenomena of common sense and of representation; it acts as an antidote to the reductionism of public opinion and, finally, it is a stimulus to depart from disciplinary silos. However, there remain unresolved issues: how to segment the relevant social milieus and how to close the feedback loop from common sense to science?     

Nice to Know You? Testing Contact,Cultural, and Group Threat Theories of Anti‐Black and Anti‐Hispanic Stereotypes*

Objective. Many racial/ethnic policies in the United States—from desegregation to affirmative action policies—presume that contact improves racial/ethnic relations. Most research, however, tests related theories in isolation from one another and focuses on black‐white contact. This article tests contact, cultural, and group threat theories to learn how contact in different interactive settings affects whites' stereotypes of blacks and Hispanics, now the largest minority group in the country. Method. We use multi‐level modeling on 2000 General Social Survey data linked to Census 2000 metropolitan statistical area/county‐level data. Results. Net of the mixed effects of regional culture and racial/ethnic composition, contact in certain interactive settings ameliorates anti‐black and anti‐Hispanic stereotypes. Conclusions. Cultural and group threat theories better explain anti‐black stereotypes than anti‐Hispanic stereotypes, but as contact theory suggests, stereotypes can be overcome with relatively superficial contact under the right conditions. Results provide qualified justification for the preservation of desegregation and affirmative action policies.     

Science Fiction and the Schoolchild

During the past decade, Soviet science fiction has experienced a boom not inferior to its "golden age" of the 1920s. Many new names have appeared. The subject matter has become more serious. The writers have improved in the literary sense. There has been a noticeable broadening in the range of readers of science fiction. Moreover, it has become increasingly possible for them to familiarize themselves with the best works of foreign writers. Finally, rather probing critical efforts have appeared — science fiction is now gaining students, and even theorists, of its own. All this is beyond question. It is hardly necessary now to prove to anyone (despite the fact that a stormy discussion raged around this matter in our national press a few years ago) that science fiction is either reading for amusement or specifically "children's" literature. However, there are still no accepted precise quantitative criteria for the readers' new attitude toward science fiction, and this has allowed some critics to defend clearly outdated ideas, constantly appealing to some "mass" or "simple" reader, although it is impossible to verify such assertions. It was for just this reason that members of the Science Fiction Fan Club at Moscow University — the students in the natural science departments who had in mind the basic principle of the exact sciences that asserts that all a priori statements must be checked by experiment — decided on an attempt to apply this principle to their favorite form of literature. The best proof of the timeliness of this test was the fact that the idea had literally permeated the atmosphere, for just as the Moscow University club began, science fiction fans in Baku, headed by G. Al'tov, decided to conduct a mass survey of science fiction readers. This made it possible to develop a coordinated questionnaire and to enlarge considerably the number of people queried. Approximately 700 questionnaires were received, and the resulting data are surely the most complete reflection of the present opinions of Soviet readers about science fiction. It would, of course, be very interesting to give a complete report on the questionnaire, but the nature of this magazine forces us to confine ourselves to the subject of science fiction and the schoolchild, and to analyze primarily the attitude of school-age readers to science fiction.     

哲学嫉妒

关于“人的科学”的观念长期以来诱惑着西方的思想家们。自然科学的每一次突破都被用来佐证哲学已经被自然科学所取代。自然科学家们常常对哲学家和文学家们不能达成一致不厌其烦。他们把这种不一致与作为自然科学的经验性的信条的标志的共识和稳步前进进行不公平的比较。最近在对大脑功能的研究方面和进化论生物学领域都取得的一些研究成果,在这种意义上也被认作为对哲学的部分的取代。然而斯蒂夫·平克用这些自然科学信条解决政治和社会问题的企图并没有什么意义。对于政治和社会问题,平克和他的盟友们提供不了任何具体的、实用的建议。他们错误地认为我们需要关于人性的理论作为解决政治和社会问题的原理。但事实并非如此,政治和社会指针只能从对人类历史的研究而不是生物学的研究中产生。西方哲学史的精神在于关于人性的理论应被关于历史的研究所取代,关于非历史的人类本质的理论,不论是哲学的还是生物学的,都不值得我们认真对待。     

Abstracts

The concept of ‘tacit knowledge’ as the means by which individuals interpret the ‘rules’ of social interaction occupies a central role in all the major contemporary theories of action and social structure. The major reference point for social theorists is Wittgenstein's celebrated discussion of rule-following in the Philosophical Investigations. Focusing on Giddens' incorporation of tacit knowledge and rules into his ‘theory of structuration’, I argue that Wittgenstein's later work is steadfastly set against the ‘latent cognitivism’ inherent in the idea of tacit knowledge and tacit rules. I also argue that the idea of tacit knowledge and tacit rules is either incoherent or explanatorily vacuous. Scholars of the emotions maintain that all anger requires an object of blame. In order to be angry, many writers argue, one must believe than an actor has done serious damage to something that one values. Yet an individual may be angered without blaming another. This kind of emotion, called situational anger, does not entail a corresponding object of blame. Situational anger can be a useful force in public life, enabling citizens to draw attention to the seriousness of social or political problems, without necessarily vilifying political officials. In the first half of this paper I show how H. L. A. Hart's theory of rules can resolve, or at least clarify, a central methodological problem in legal anthropology that was first posed in Llewellyn and Egebel's The Cheyenñe Way In the second half I explore and develop Hart's theory (a) of rules, and apply it to problems of agency and behaviourism in legal anthropology, and (b) of legal development, and apply it to the problem of rule-scepticism in legal anthropology as it is posed in Roberts and Comaroffs Rules and Processes and elsewhere. As human beings, we share many historically developed, language-game interwoven, public forms of life. Due to the joint, dialogically responsive nature of all social life within such forms, we cannot as individuals just act as we please; our forms of life exert a normative influence on what we can say and do. They act as a backdrop against which all our claims to knowledge are judged as acceptable or not. As a result, it is not easy to articulate their inadequacies in a clear and forceful manner. However, within most of our forms of life, we have a first-person right to express how our individual circumstances seem to us. And by the use of special forms of poetic, gestural talk—talk that can originate new language-games—we can offer to make our own ‘inner lives’ public. In this paper, I want to claim that this is just what Wittgenstein is attempting to do in his later philosophy: by use of the self-same methods that anyone might use to express aspects of their own world picture, he is offering us his attempts to make the background ‘landscape’ of our lives more visible to us. These methods are explored below. Proponents of the view that social structures are ontologically distinct from the people in whose actions they are immanent have assumed that structures can stand in causal relations to individual practices. Were causality to be no more than Humean concomitance correlations between structure and practices would be unproblematic. But two prominent advocates of the ontological account of structures, Bhaskar and Giddens, have also espoused a powers theory of causality. According to that theory causation is brought about by the activity of particulars, in the social psychological case, individuals of some sort. Consistence would demand that structure be those individuals. But neither Giddens nor Bhaskar wish to reify structure to the extent that would fit it for a role as a powerful particular. If only human beings can be powerful particulars in these contexts, the only way that structures can be real must be as properties of conversational (symbolic) interactions. Human action is social just in so far as people direct themselves to engage well in joint activities with others.     

Critical Realism,Dialectics, and Qualitative Research Methods

Critical realism has been an important advance in social science methodology because it develops a qualitative theory of causality which avoids some of the pitfalls of empiricist theories of causality. But while there has been ample work exploring the relationship between critical realism and qualitative research methods there has been noticeably less work exploring the relationship between dialectical critical realism and qualitative research methods. This seems strange especially since the founder of the philosophy of critical realism, Roy Bhaskar, employs and develops a range of dialectical concepts in his later work in order to extend the main tenets of critical realism. The aim of this paper is to draw on Bhaskar's later work, as well as Marxism, to reorient a critical realist methodology towards a dialectical approach for qualitative research. In particular, the paper demonstrates how dialectical critical realism can begin to provide answers to three common criticisms made against original critical realist methodology: that the qualitative theory of causal powers and structures developed by critical realists is problematic; that critical realist methodology contains values which prove damaging to empirical research; and that critical realists often have difficulties in researching everyday qualitative dilemmas that people face in their daily lives.     

Why some theories fail to describe, explain, and predict: Reconstructing the future

Thomas Kuhn, as a physicist, persuasively discussed theory construction and change as well as pointed out the existence of paradigm shifts. But, constrained by human being's way of perceiving reality and thinking, though scholars and experts can construct theory so as to understand human interactions, they will sooner or later realize that theory often fails to perform satisfactorily. What is the nature or substance of this world and how would the world develop in the future? This article is written from the philosophical and cultural perspectives and suggests a new way of reconstructing the future. By taking human behavior, language, science, philosophy, mathematics, and logic into consideration, the author argues that in this way we would be able to enter into a new world of analyzing phenomena.     

Social positioning theory and quantum mechanics

Social positioning theory, or an account of the human individual that it grounds, qualifies as a quantum social theory. This is an assessment that I explain and defend in the paper. It is of interest in that, in a world where increasing numbers are seeking to construct quantum social theories, it serves to help demonstrate that this goal can be achieved without giving up on meeting criteria like explanatory intelligibility or power or discarding real-world notions like human (and other) entities. As it turns out, a central feature of the account defended and a core element of the ‘standard’ interpretation of quantum mechanics are found to stand in an interesting, unanticipated and suggestive relation to each other.     

证伪：社会科学研究的可能与必然 兼与张杨商榷

本文针对张杨《证伪在社会科学中可能吗？》一文展开争鸣与论述,指出证伪是理论检验的必然结果之一,相对于证实而言,证伪更有效、更可靠。本文还就张杨文中对波普尔证伪理论的误解做了澄清,指出波普尔的证伪并非“单个反例证伪”,证伪、可证伪性、证伪主义三者之间也存在着明显的区别,不能加以混淆。文章就张文提出的证伪在社会科学中面临的四个挑战做出一一回应：（1）“迪昂奎因命题”不能成为证伪的诘问;（2）穆勒命题不能挑战证伪主义;（3）统计陈述不是概率陈述;（4）限界条件与证伪的结合使社会科学的理论更加科学。     

从工具到范式：假设检验争议的知识社会学反思

统计工具的建构与运用不能脱离知识生产的情境脉络,其中渗透着建构者和运用者的个人主张与其所在学科的整体价值追求。原假设显著性检验是社会科学实证研究中最为常用的假设检验方法,其流行并非因为方法论本身的精确无误,而在于它虽存有争议并因此招致严厉批评,但仍简洁有效地满足了研究者追求知识的客观性与确定性、以期将自身所在的学科塑造为一门科学分支的主观期待。因此,这一方法就从一个普通的统计工具上升为一种学科范式,起到了收敛学科的精神指向、提供模式化的解题方法、从而实现学科内部知识较快发展的功能。     

The logical structure of applied social science

In the present article the logical structure of applied social sciences will be discussed. Applied sciences don't regard causes and effects but only means and ends. Therefore the logical structure of means-end-argumentations in social sciences will be shown. One can perceive also the important part of normative statements. In summarizing, we can declare that in social sciences there is partly a need to reflect on the postulate of a value-free social science. But it is not our purpose to introduce normative statements as scientific ones. What counts is a liberal attitude towards all realizable norms.     

The ranking assumption

This paper is an attempt to raise some general objections to the whole concept of making decisions on teleological principles. Its scope is finally the whole concept of how we rationally decide, on a teleological basis, to do any act at all. However the arguments developed here arise from the recent discussions about one particular species of teleological decision-making - utilitarianism. Therefore, while I hope that the paper has consequences that are important far beyond this one ethical theory, my objections are phrased in terms of direct arguments about utilitarianism. The recent lively debates on this topic make it easy to ask some interesting questions about this sort of goal-oriented theory. However, if my objections are correct, the scope of these questions is much wider than any one utilitarian theory (or cluster of theories) because my objections are about an assumption that is common to all teleological theories and not just to classical utilitarianism.     

On the structuralist constraints in social scientific theorizing

Several case studies and theoretical reports indicate that the structuralist concept of a constraint has a central role in the reconstruction of physical theories. It is surprising that there is only little theoretical discussion on the relevance of constraints for the reconstruction of social scientific theories in the literature. Almost all structuralist reconstructions of social theorizing are vacuously constrained. Consequently, constraints are methodologically irrelevant.In this paper I reconstruct three cases selected from social scientific theorizing. The first case is a generalization of Gross, Mason and McEachern's (1958) role expectation conflict theory, which is a qualitative theory. The second case is Cohen and Lee's (1975) quantitative theory of social conformity, which essentially utilizes the theor of Markov chains. The third case is the explanation schema of folk psychology which is one of the most important methodological frameworks in the social sciences.In all the three cases important constraints emerge. From an epistemological point of view it seems that the related constraints work as higher-order laws. In any case, purely conceptual arguments are insufficient to justify them.The three cases,mutatis mutandis, cover nearly all types of social scientific theorizing, so that in my view constraints play a crucial methodological role in the social sciences precisely as they have in the natural sciences.     

Public Policy and the Effects of Media Violence on Children

Policymakers and the public have been concerned about the effects of media violence on children for decades. Scientific psychological research can be an important source of information for policy, as the goal of science is to separate facts from opinions. This article reviews children's exposure to media violence, describes theories that explain the effects media violence could have, summarizes the research on the effects of media violence exposure, and describes several moderators that can enhance or mitigate those effects. These scientific findings provide useful information for public policy, yet there are many barriers to their use, including misunderstandings of how causality is determined in scientific and public health circles and how large the effects are. Finally, the implications for public policy are discussed, including what has and has not worked in the United States, what other countries and the international community are doing, and where opportunities for new approaches for effective policies may exist.