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Philosophies of Social Sciences (SPS-RECHE-PHI-24)

SPS-RECHE-PHI-24

Purpose

This seminar critically examines the philosophical scaffolding that stands behind all social science research. It begins – Part I - with two sessions that introduce key philosophical concepts (ontology, epistemology, hermeneutics) and survey the multiple philosophical traditions – positivism, critical realism, interpretivism, post-structuralism, humanism – upon which social scientists draw. Here, we also consider the philosophical literature on pluralism, exploring if it means more than ‘doing mixed methods.’ In Part II, we devote two sessions to surveying both the Western (Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Charles Taylor, Ludwig Wittgenstein) and non-Western (Chinese, Buddhist) philosophers and political thought that stand behind and inform much of contemporary philosophy of social science.
Part III is the seminar’s core and includes four sessions where we survey how social scientists are operationalizing these philosophical traditions in contemporary debates over studying and accessing the social world. We consider the work of both sociologists (Mustafa Emirbayer, Charles Tilly) and political scientists (Patrick Jackson, Peter Katzenstein, Alexander Wendt, James Der Derian, Mark Bevir, Jason Blakely) on relationalism, uncertainty, anti-naturalism, philosophical ontologies, and quantum mechanical ontologies. In very different ways, all this recent work moves social science beyond the Newtonian world view that has been so dominant over the past 100 years.

In Part IV, we conclude with two sessions that make the various philosophical debates more applied, by considering that little thing upon which almost all of us rely: cause (J). We start by surveying the philosophical/conceptual history that underpins our contemporary understandings (note the plural) of cause. This allows us to then see the pluses and minuses of the differing ways we understand cause (expected outcomes; counterfactual; manipulative) and operationalize/measure it (causal effects, causal mechanisms, local causation, constitutive causation).
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