On misunderstanding ‘understanding’

Philosophers of Science have recently put a good deal of energy into locating the precise methodological boundaries between the natural and the social sciences. The methodological affinities of the latter with certain aspects of the humanities have been as yet too little explored. A convenient starting point for this discussion, and one which is adopted in this paper, is a reconsideration of the role and nature of interpretive understanding in the social sciences. However, before a serious examination of this issue can be undertaken, a clearing operation on the encrusted misunderstandings which are part of the legacy of logical positivism is necessary. In this paper I argue that the neo-positivistic account of understanding rests on a misunderstanding of the concept; that a more adequate conception of the issues involved - and one closer to the traditional Verstehen problematic of Dilthey et al. - can be gleaned from the work of Peter Winch; and that this development is furthered in a number of important respects by recent work done in hermeneutic philosophy - especially that of H.-G. Gadamer. The discussion of Gadamer suggests that the problem of locating the boundaries with the humanities might be as serious a problem for the theory of the social sciences as has been that concerning the natural sciences. The paper concludes with several suggestions as to the implications of the analysis of understanding for the thesis of the methodological unity of the sciences.     

Determinate attitudes and indeterminate norms

The aim of this paper is to offer a version of social normative pragmatism – that is, the approach that takes norms to be the result of shared practices – that comes closer to social reality than its cousins in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. The purpose is presenting a framework that can be useful for social theorists sympathetic to normative concepts. This version introduces the concepts of the adoption of the normative stance, the projective structure of evaluation and a sketch of a theory of normative force in terms of accumulation of normative attitude. In order to motivate this conceptual tools, we present them as allowing us to overcome the traditional skeptical challenge put forward by Kripke.     

再论证伪主义的问题:对尹海洁、庞文商榷的答复

本文回应了尹海洁等两位作者对笔者的批评,并再次质疑了证伪主义在社会科学中的适用性。本文指出,由于“迪昂奎因”命题的存在以及社会科学命题的或然性,简单证伪并不可能;而波普尔和尹文所谓的复杂证伪则不可取,因为这种证伪本质上基于归纳法,相对于证实并无优越性和简便性,因而也就失去了波普尔立论的根基。同时,社会科学的统计检验自有其意义,并不需要冠以“证伪”的名号;而“可证伪性”即使存在,但在定量研究中既缺乏操作性,又完全被涵盖于 “解释力”这个概念之中。基于以上理由,“可证伪性”不具备成为社会科学和非科学的划界标准的意义,证伪主义不是社会科学赖以立基的逻辑基础。本文还延伸讨论了证伪、限界条件和发展社会科学经验研究的关系。     

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。     

Contemplative Methods Meet Social Sciences: Back to Human Experience as It Is

The aim of this paper is to trace a pathway connecting contemplative knowledge and practices with the social sciences. Contemplative knowledge and practices offer material for reflection in social science even concerning their very foundation. I'll found an opportunity for meshing our disciplinary tools with this knowledge as I introduced it in a health promotion program. The result will be a transdisciplinary confluence of different lines of inquiry contributing to a new perspective of self and social action. First of all I will give a definition of contemplative knowledge and practices. Then, I will make a bridge between the contemplative approach and the social sciences, showing the contribution that symbolic interactionism can play. I will illustrate the perspective drawing on an action research program called Auriga aimed at smoking cessation and reduction among health professionals. The aim of this paper is focused on the specification of the conceptual background in which such kind of program has been developed. Finally, I outline some implications it could represent for what might be called transformative sociology. I believe that contemplative knowledge could contribute to disentangle some of the unanswered questions and concerns in the social sciences, once they dismiss for a while their scientistic perspective. The secular redefinition of tools mainly belonging to the wisdom traditions represents an innovation that can reshape what we intend by the self and experience, contributing to what is called the “social transformation from within,” a pragmatic and wise approach to change at any level.     

Strategic uncertainty,coordination failure and emergence: A game theory study on agency‐structure interactions

In the social sciences there is a long standing debate over the primacy of structure or agency in shaping human behavior. Structurationists like Giddens think of individuals' agency and collective features as two sides of the same coin while emergentists including Archer and Elder‐Vass claim that structurationists are blurring an important ontological distinction——they argue for effective social analysis, we should think of structures and individuals as different things because emergence happens when the properties of the collective are not reducible to the properties of the parts that constitute them. This paper contributes to the agency‐structure debate by showing how production and reproduction of emergent properties of social groups sharing same normative commitments (norm circles) can be empirically studied using two behavioral game theory experiments, adding a previously neglected insight that strategic uncertainty can lead to coordination failures of individual behaviors within norm circles, manifested as unintended outcomes of interdependent actions that are difficult to predict. Here the synchronic relation between the unpredictable collective outcomes of each game round and agential reactions of the participants to them defines emergence——the previous outcomes are diachronic inputs but they appear in the new outcome only through their effects on the individual decisions.     

系统创新全面发展走向世界——关于“十二五”时期中国哲学社会科学创新体系建设的思考

30多年来,中国思想解放、改革开放的伟大实践推动着哲学社会科学的创新取得了五大成就,开启了理论创新的时代。“十二五”时期,中国哲学社会科学研究将步入系统创新的新阶段,将从个别观点、个别结论的创新转换到基础理论、理论体系和方法论的创新;从单一学科、单一视野的创新转换到综合创新、交叉创新和新学科群的崛起;从无序竞争转换到有序推进。作为创新型国家建设的重要内容,哲学社会科学创新体系、创新能力建设与自然科学同为“鸟之两翼”、“车之两轮”,同样重要。中国哲学社会科学创新规划应当强化“国家意识”、建立“国家目标”、设立“国家工程”。系统创新、全面发展、走向世界,这是当代中国哲学社会科学的基本任务。     

On the consistency of choice

Consistency of choice is a fundamental and recurring theme in decision theory, social choice theory, behavioral economics, and psychological sciences. The purpose of this paper is to study the consistency of choice independent of the particular decision model at hand. Consistency is viewed as an inherently logical concept that is fundamentally void of connotation and is thus disentangled from traditional rationality or consistency conditions imposed on decision models. The proposed formalization of consistency takes two forms: internal consistency, which refers to the property that a choice model does not generate contradictory statements; and semantic consistency, which refers to the idea that a theory’s predictions are valid with respect to some observed data. In addressing semantic consistency, the relationship between theory and data is analyzed in terms of so-called duality mappings, which allow a passage between the two universes in a way that consistency is preserved. The formalization of consistency concepts relies on adapting the revealed preference theory to the context-dependent setting. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of the proposed framework and how it relates to classical revealed preference theory and other formalizations of the relationship between the theory and reality of choice.     

Piaget's Social Psychology

Piaget's social psychology is not widely discussed among psychologists, partly because much of it is still contained in untranslated French works. In this article I summarize the main lines of Piaget's social psychology and briefly indicate its relation to current theories in social psychology. Rejecting both Durkheim's sociological holism and Tarde's individualism, Piaget advances a sociological relativism (relationalism) in which all social facts are reducible to social relations and these, in turn, are reducible to rules, values and signs. Piaget's theory of social values takes the form of a social exchange theory characterized in an abstract logical way. Piaget claims social exchange requires normative principles of reciprocity and that individual social development results in such an equilibrium because rationality itself is social and based upon social cooperation. These views, in turn, derive from Piaget's orthogenetic views concerning the course of evolution: development can be characterized as an increase in equilibrium manifested both in individual action and in social interaction.     

Beyond Husserl and Schütz. Hermann Schmitz and Neophenomenological Sociology

Phenomenological sociology is one of the most recognized approaches for explaining the constitution of social behaviour and the construction of social reality. To this day, phenomenological sociology usually belongs to the tradition of Edmund Husserl's transcendental phenomenology and to Alfred Schütz's mundane phenomenology, thus generally presenting itself as sociology of lifeworld, sociology of everyday life, and sociology of knowledge. In contrast to this, this paper intends to outline an alternative kind of phenomenological sociology that finds its philosophical foundation in Hermann Schmitz's “New Phenomenology”. With regards especially to Schmitz's theory of the felt body (“Leib”) and his theory of situation, the basic principles of Neophenomenological Sociology (NPS) will be introduced. Their main components are (1) felt body and affective involvement as the pre-personal apriori of sociality, (2) felt-bodily communication as the basic unit of sociality, and (3) joint situations as the socio-ontological foundation and empirical manifestation of sociality. With these specific key concepts, NPS proves itself to be a socio-theoretical approach whose foremost strength is that it can identify and properly analyse the pathic dimensions of social behaviour and social situations that social sciences tend to overlook.     

Varieties of commitment

This discussion of some aspects of the problem of conditional normative statements, conditional obligations, or commitments will first focus on some well-known pseudo-paradoxes, then state some different ways of symbolizing conditioned norm statements and, finally, end up with a remark concerning von Wright's interpretation of commitments by means of a logic of necessary and sufficient conditions.     

The Theory of Conditionality: An Illustration of the Place of Norms in the Field of Social Thinking

In the field of the central core theory of social representations, research which has focused on the normative aspects is relatively recent as it dates back little more than ten years. The theory of conditionality which developed from research into the periphery of representation results from this. It is a particularly fruitful theory to explain “normative latitudes” and the behaviour accruing to them. One of the particularities of these works stresses the importance of linking the normative aspects with specific methods and/or analyses. In this paper, we will illustrate it via a specific tool developed in the field of traffic psychology: the Conditional Script Questionnaire (CSQ). This approach makes it possible to highlight the interactions between two systems of norms: the legal system and the social system. The implication of norms is fundamental in different processes already studied such as social influence or identity processes, and this article can be considered as an illustration of the place of norms in the field of social thinking.     

Institutional Violations,Costs and Attitudes

The paper proposes an alternative approach to the ontology of social institutions by systematizing various normative institutional influences and identifying processes that distinguish between conforming and violating behaviour. The prevailing – cost-based model – suggests that an agent's conformity to a specific institutional rule can be represented by a single measure – cost. The model is limited in its explanatory potential since it accounts for varieties of institutional behaviour in terms of single parametrical changes in the agents' utilities. The central argument shows that normative attitudes represent a distinctive normative structure capable of explaining crucial aspects of institutional behaviour. These attitudinal aspects provide the structure necessary for understanding institutional normativity and its violations.     

Social Structure and Social Relations

This paper replies to Porpora, King, and Varela's responses to my earlier paper “For Emergence”, focussing on the relationship between the concepts of social structure and social relations. It recognises the importance of identifying the mechanisms responsible whenever we make claims for the emergence of causal powers, and discusses the mechanism underlying one case of social structure: normative institutions. It also shows how critical realism reconciles the claims that both social structures and human individuals have emergent causal powers that combine to produce actual social events.     

对于气候变化问题的哲学反思

气候变化问题是当今时代关注的热点问题,考察这一问题不能离开与人类社会发展的联系,所以对于这一问题的研究不能仅仅局限于自然科学领域,必须同时站在社会科学与自然科学辩证统一的立场进行讨论与研究,由此才可全面理解气候变化问题与社会可持续发展的关系。改变传统的发展观和不科学的价值观是解决气候变化问题的关键。     

Theorizing Political Psychology: Doing Integrative Social Science Under the Condition of Postmodernity

The field of political psychology, like the social sciences more generally, is being challenged. New theoretical direction is being demanded from within and a greater epistemological sophistication and ethical relevance is being demanded from without. In response, an outline for a reconstructed political psychology is offered here. To begin, a theoretical framework for a truly integrative political psychology is sketched. In the attempt to transcend the reductionist quality of cross-disciplinary or multidisciplinary inquiry, the theoretical approach offered here emphasizes the dually structured quality of social life as the singular product of both organizing social structures and defining discourse communities on the one hand and motivated, thinking individuals on the other. To further this theoretical effort, meta-theoretical considerations are addressed. The modernist-postmodernist debate regarding the status of truth and value is used as a point of departure for constructing the epistemological foundation for political psychology. In this light, structural pragmatic guidelines for theory construction, empirical research and normative inquiry are presented. While the focus remains on political psychology in particular, it is assumed that the criticisms of present research and the suggestions for future inquiry apply to the social sciences more generally.     

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.     

Arguments for the cognitive social sciences

This article analyses the arguments for the integration between the cognitive and social sciences. We understand interdisciplinary integration as an umbrella term that includes different ways of bringing scientific disciplines together. Our focus is on four arguments based on different ideas about how the cognitive sciences should be integrated with the social sciences: explanatory grounding, theoretical unification, constraint and complementarity. These arguments not only provide different reasons why the cognitive social sciences—i.e. disciplines and research programs that aim to integrate the social sciences with the cognitive sciences—are needed but also subscribe to different visions as to how these sciences might look like. We discuss each argument in three stages: First, we provide a concrete example of the argument. Second, we reconstruct the argument by specifying its premises, inferential structure and conclusion. Third, we evaluate the argument by analyzing its presuppositions, the plausibility of its premises, the soundness of its inferences and potential conceptual ambiguities. In the final discussion, we compare these arguments and identify the most compelling reasons why the cognitive social sciences are needed.     

Challenges in Multidisciplinary Systematic Reviewing: A Study on Social Exclusion and Mental Health Policy

In the clinical sciences, systematic reviews have proved useful in the aggregation of diverse sources of evidence. They identify, characterize and summate evidence, but these methodologies have not always proved suitable for the social sciences. We discuss some of the practical problems faced by researchers undertaking reviews of complex and cross‐disciplinary topics, using the example of mental health and social exclusion. The barriers to carrying out social science and cross‐disciplinary reviews are reported and some proposals for overcoming these barriers are made, not all of them tried and tested, and some of them controversial. Using a mapping approach, a wide‐ranging search of both clinical and social science databases was undertaken and a large volume of references was identified and characterized. Population sampling techniques were used to manage these references. The challenges encountered include: inconsistent definitions of social phenomena, differing use of key concepts across research fields and practical problems relating to database compatibility and computer processing power. The challenges and opportunities for social scientists or multidisciplinary research teams carrying out reviews are discussed. Literature mapping and systematic reviews are useful tools but methods need to be tailored to optimize their usefulness in the social sciences.