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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to contribute to the sociology of nations, a literature that is only starting to carve out its place in the social sciences. The paper offers a reconceptualization of 'nations' as 'national cultures', employing an evolutionary perspective and a systemic framework in which 'nations' are understood as cultural systems of a special kind. National cultures are intimately tied to natural languages, and the acquisition of a national culture occurs as part and parcel of the acquisition of a natural language. Acquiring a natural language is a prerequisite for learning other cultural systems (artefactual languages as well as other natural languages). National cultures function as metacultures. They are also the reference cultures for modern states and their citizens, a political dimension of nations that is of paramount importance, though it will only be touched on in this paper. National cultures should be considered as the most fundamental type of cultural system today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Elder-Vass's “For Emergence: refining Archer's account of social structure,” is the latest of a number of papers which together constitute a family quarrel in the cognitive space After Postmodernism among realist social scientists. In the case under examination here in “Elder-Vass's Move and Giddens's Call”, the concern is the structure and agency problem in the social sciences. The debate continuing in Elder-Vass's paper represents the proponents of the resurrection of Durkheim's social realism under the auspices of Bhaskar's Transcendental Realism; the debate that continues here as a response to the Elder-Vass paper, opposes the latter's attempt to advance the argument for social realism under the canopy of Harre's Immanental realism. The theme of this response is this: Elder-Vass fails to realize the promise of reconciling social structural realism and social relational realism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT:This paper is a re-examination of the issue of objectivity in sociology. Though it begins from the premise that objectivity is a necessary precondition for a minimally scientific sociology, it sides with subjectivists who claim that values are ever present in investigation. Values are shown to exist along a continuum in investigation. The paper develops the argument that objectivity is a value itself and is nested in other values that will take on a contextual character dependent upon disciplines. Two brief research examples are used to illustrate the way in which objectivity is transferred (or fails to get transferred) through three different levels in sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social constructionism is a broad position that emphasizes the importance of human social processes in psychology. These processes are generally associated with language and the ability to construct stories that conform to the emergent rules of "language games". This view allows one to espouse a variety of critical postures with regard to realist commitments within the social and behavioural sciences, ranging from outright relativism (language constructs all of our concepts) to a more moderate respect for the "barrier" that linguistic descriptions can place between us and reality. This paper first outlines some possible social construction-ist viewpoints and then goes on to show how each of them conforms to the basic principles of information theory. After establishing this relation the paper then argues that this leads to a great deal of commonality between social construction-ist positions and the baseline aims of cognitive science. Finally, the paper argues that, if information theory is held in common, this both suggests future research collaborations and helps to "mop up" some of the arguments surrounding realist commitments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the concept of “sociology” and the logical limits which, it is argued, are imposed upon its practice by the nature of the subject matter it investigates. This thesis is developed, first, by examining Michael Oakeshott’s distinction between “technical” and “practical” knowledge, and his concept of “abridgment”. The view of human action which follows from this is then applied to sociological practice in order to show how the latter involves a unique sort of abridgment. Then, drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy, it is argued that sociological inquiry has its own form of investigation which is most accurately termed “description”. Finally, Harvey Sacks' notion of “primitive, natural science” is critically examined as an account of social science which approximates most closely to the one being articulated here. The weakness of Sacks’ account, it is suggested, can be explained by his failure to appreciate the Oakeshottian insights about human action with which the argument began. The paper concludes by drawing out some implications of the proposed thesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses some widespread but often not fully articulated views concerning the possible roles of biology and evolution in the social sciences. Such views cluster around a set of intuitions that suggest that evolution's role is 'ballistic': it constitutes a starting point for mind that has been, and is, superseded by the role of culture and social construction. An implication is that evolved and the socially constructed aspects of mind are separable and independent, with the latter being the primary driver of mind. I outline four variants of the ballistic view. I then show how current findings and arguments in evolutionary thinking as related to mind contradict those ballistic views. The contrary view-that evolutionary and social factors are interdependent in the generation of social psychological capacities-is proposed as a consequence. This view is able to respect some insights of theories that make ballistic assumptions, whilst avoiding those assumptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that an explanation of the role of aesthetic patterning in human action needs to be part of any 'qualitative' social theory. It urges the social sciences to move beyond contextualism and to see art as visual, acoustic and other media that lead to heightened sensory perception and the coordination of feelings through symbols. The article surveys the argument that art provides a basic model of how the self learns to interact with external environments; and the complementary thesis that art could be seen as integral to the emergence of systems of human knowledge, communication and economy. Ornamentation and stylization are advanced as two concrete devices through which human attention is captured and experience is ordered through aesthetic patterns. The conclusion is drawn that art offers the social sciences a meaningful account of the perceptual or 'qualitative' dimensions of social interactions; and that this is much needed today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ignorance has been both vilified and celebrated throughout the ages. However, the social sciences have had little to say about this topic over the years. In this paper, we argue that in an age of competing and contrasting worldviews, scholarly attention to ignorance can shed light on interpersonal processes and relational dynamics that occur in encounters between subjects holding different points of view. We discuss data from two studies documenting an attribution of ignorance in social relations that serves to relegate the other's point of view to one that stands in need of education or correction. We argue that this communicative strategy enacts a semantic barrier that serves to retain the interlocutor's original point of view unscathed and unchallenged. We argue that this limits dialogical relations by eliminating the requirement for perspective-taking in social dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an approach to the question of meaning and understanding based on the idea of constitutive rules and their relationship to the social objects they are used to create. This approach implicates mutual attention as an essential aspect of the social processes constitutive of social objects and mutual intelligibility. Social objects as such include the meaning, perception and coherence of things, identities and talk, etc. There is a relatively unexplored but important line of argument in sociology that has, from the beginning, explained the coherence and mutual intelligibility of social objects and associations in terms of constitutive practices and social facts. This line of argument begins with Emile Durkheim (1893) and carries through the work of Harold Garfinkel to current studies of work and interaction, human computer interaction and talk. The argument is that we use constitutive practices (Constitutive rules or constitutive background expectancies) to create social objects and make coherent and shared meanings. To act is in this sense for Garfinkel ([1948]2006) to 'mean'. Explaining the consistency of social objects and orders in terms of constitutive orders, rules, or practices is an approach that meets the challenges posed to social science and philosophy by ), ) and ). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its emergence in the first half of the twentieth century, there has been considerable discussion of the viability and value of analytic induction (AI) as a conceptualisation of social scientific method; one which challenges the correlational approach to causal analysis characteristic of much quantitative work. However, less attention has been given to the philosophical sources on which Znaniecki, Lindesmith, and other exponents of AI relied. This paper explores some of these, and focuses in particular upon the use made of Lewin's distinction between Aristotelian and Galileian forms of science. The status of AI is ambiguous in relation to this; and it is a distinction that raises some fundamental issues more generally about the methodology of social science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social science requires a dual ontology: one for the physical realm, and one for the symbolic realm of meaning. Much research produced in social science remains based in an old paradigm, which entirely neglects the symbolic realm. While social scientists attempting to forge a new paradigm have embraced a discursive approach, this approach lacks a coherent framework that can be systematically applied in the analysis of meaning. This paper presents the positioning diamond as a framework that can be employed in discourse analysis across social science disciplines. The four facets of the diamond—storylines, identities, rights and duties, and the social force of acts—can be analyzed at three levels of discourse: the content, narrator-interlocutor, and ideological levels. The framework can be employed to provide explanations of most types of human thought and action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transformation and change of social knowledge in Modern Turkish Republic has begun with the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Whilst the transformation of knowledge took place in daily knowledge, the change that took place in the political structures had a broad influence in the language, religion and tradition. The appearance of a new form of daily knowledge created a new common sense and this has opened the road towards the possibility of investigating social representations of various phenomena. Among these the social representations of madness in daily knowledge have already existed in common sense knowledge for a long time. With this in mind, the main goal of this paper is to explore contemporary urban Turkish social representations of madness. This study has shown that both scientific and common sense knowledge exist at present in citizens’ daily knowledge and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper compares John Dewey's pragmatism and cultural-historical activity theory as epistemologies and theories of transformative material activity. For both of the theories, the concept of activity, the prototype of which is work, constitutes a basis for understanding the nature of knowledge and reality. This concept also implies for both theories a methodological approach of studying human behavior in which social experimentation and intervention play a central role. They also suggest that reflection and thought, mediated by language and semiotic artifacts, serve the reorientation of activity and is vital in the development of new, alternative ways of action. That is why Dewyan pragmatism and activity theory supply means of understanding organizational behavior and change in human activities better than the concepts of practice based on rule following, routines or embodied skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to balance the conceptual reception of Bourdieu's sociology in the United States through a conceptual re-examination of the concept of Habitus. I retrace the intellectual lineage of the Habitus idea, showing it to have roots in Claude Levi-Strauss structural anthropology and in the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget, especially the latter's generalization of the idea of operations from mathematics to the study of practical, bodily-mediated cognition. One important payoff of this exercise is that the common misinterpretation of the Habitus as an objectivist and reductionist element in Bourdieu's thought is dispelled. The Habitus is shown to be instead a useful and flexible way to concep-tualize agency and the ability to transform social structure. Thus ultimately one of Bourdieu's major contributions to social theory consists of his development of a new radical form of cognitive sociology, along with an innovative variety of multilevel sociological explanation in which the interplay of different structural orders is highlighted. In keeping with the usual view, the goal of sociology is to uncover the most deeply buried structures of the different social worlds that make up the social universe, as well as the "mechanisms" that tend to ensure their reproduction or transformation. Merging with psychology, though with a kind of psychology undoubtedly quite different from the most widely accepted image of this science, such an exploration of the cognitive structures that agents bring to bear in their practical knowledge of the social worlds thus structured. Indeed there exists a correspondence between social structures and mental structures, between the objective divisions of the social world . . . and the principles of vision and division that agents apply to them (Bourdieu, 1996b[1989], p. 1). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amidst both philosophers of science and social scientists (including historians) one finds people defending the thesis that explanations of particular facts should refer to proximate causes, or that explanations referring to remote causes are at least less—if they are any—good (e.g. Jon Elster, Paul Veyne, Michael Taylor, etc.). The idea is that any explanatory factor at a temporal remove from the fact to be explained, should be replaced by a factor closer to the fact. This close–grain preference is a matter of favoring explanations that provide the detailed mediating mechanisms in non–interrupted causal chains across time. The claims we want to defend in this paper are: (1) explanations of plain facts (as opposed to explanations of contrasts between facts) that invoke remote causes on top of proximate causes are often better than explanations that invoke only proximate causes; and. (2) explanations of contrasts between facts that invoke only proximate cause are often worthless: one has to invoke a remote cause in order to provide a minimally adequate contrastive explanation. The upshot of this is that the close–grain preference should be replaced with a more differentiated explanatory pluralism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paul Lewis has recently engaged Varela and Harre’s discussion of Bashkar’s problem with the reification of social structure. Lewis argues that Varela and Harré are correct in their conclusion that social structure is not an efficient cause—a powerful particular. Nevertheless, he then argues that social structure is an effective cause. In this paper I address this apparent paradox by further developing causal powers theory. I argue that if x-structure is not causally powerful it cannot be causally effective. Any declaration to the contrary renders causal powers theory incoherent. The implication is that any attempt to save the thesis that social structure is an effective cause is problematic if it appeals to an alternative notion of causality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent challenge of Dynamical Systems Theory (also known as ComplexityTheory or Chaos Theory) to the social sciences, is based largely on the beliefthat processes in the social arena can be considered as analogous to those of the natural world, and that in consequence general theoretical advances in explaining the latter might with advantage be applied to the former. This paper aims to show that claims for Dynamical Systems Theory with respect to the understanding or measurement of social processes would be premature; the reasons for this lying not only in the unfamiliarity and operational difficulties of Dynamical Systems Theory in itself, but also in the problematic nature and history of our usage of the term 'social process'. Reviewing some examples of such usage from Sociology and Social Psychology, it is concluded that Dynamical Systems Theory might serve as a catalyst for a re-examination of existing orthodoxies and major concepts, but that progress would be retarded by the uncritical application of it's terminology, concepts, and techniques of mathematical modelling, without this prior and demanding first step. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many social scientists and journalists attempt to explain events in recent or distant history by uncovering hidden beliefs and desires held by groups. Such ascriptions are problematic in that beliefs are attributed to groups rather than individuals, and, in that being "hidden," they cannot be attributed using ordinary everyday methods. In this paper, I try to sort out what is sensible and what is muddled in this unusual but very common type of belief ascription. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a re-examination of Popper's propensity interpretation of probability in respect of its potential methodological value in social science. A long standing problem for the (standard) frequency interpretation of probability is that whilst it is able to treat both aggregate and individual phenomena as having measurable properties, it cannot explain the ontological relationship between such concrete individual cases and aggregates. Popper's interpretation treats single cases as both real, but also as realisations of a propensity to occur. The frequency and propensity interpretations are compared and whilst some common objections raised must be upheld, they do not devalue the importance of the propensity interpretation as at least a metaphysical basis for probabilistic claims in social science. However the value of the approach may also lie in its methodological potential. Here I sugest that single case probabilities must be analysed in terms of the anterior probabilities of prior constituent events. In this I move beyond Popper's own programme, but suggest that such a move is theoretically compatible with recent complexity approaches in social science and goes some way toward meeting anti-naturalist concerns about intentionality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]