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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to introduce the philosophical concept of vagueness and use it to critique the explanatory scope of social ontology as developed by the Cambridge Social Ontology Group (CSOG), and scholars sympathetic to it. Specifically, we will refer to one of its core theories, the theory of social positioning, to formulate our critique. This theory proposes that human beings and artefacts occupy social positions within emerging social totalities by virtue of receiving community accepted, interdependent, rights and obligations. Vagueness, here, is to be understood as a matter of indeterminacy in borderline cases that pose non‐trivial limitations to social positioning. By this we mean to say that there are instances in social ontological theorising that exclude themselves from proper inquiry due to vague terms found in natural languages. As a consequence of these vague terms, theories in social ontology formulated in such languages face limitations when striving for precisification and accuracy of theories. We further argue that these limitations cannot be overcome, but introduce four theories, namely supervaluationsim, epistemicism, truth degree theories and contextualism, which will allow interested readers to understand why these limitations are present. Finally, we consider the controversial theory of ontic vagueness and outline the implications for social ontology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Staging public engagement events to inform health policy is becoming increasingly common. In these events, participation from a diversity of individuals is fostered to enhance the input to policy from those groups of whom individual participants are seen to be are representative. Participants' identities thus come to be seen as constituted by group membership and roles they occupy in society. Recent insights from social psychology and other disciplines suggest that replacing the notion of role with that of subject positioning serves to better understand the multiple and fluid nature of personhood. In this paper we use the notion of subject positions to understand the way in which participants in a particular public engagement (The BC Biobank Deliberation) drew on different aspects of their identity to warrant arguments during deliberation. The aims of the paper are: to create theoretical links between deliberative democracy and positioning theory; to address a gap in knowledge of the process of deliberation itself, and to illustrate the use of positioning theory as a viable analytical lens through which to develop a deeper understanding of the communicative practices that constitute deliberation; and to contribute to the theoretical literature on positioning theory as the discursive constraints present in the institutional settings of deliberative forums offer a novel context within which to study subject positioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that recent sociological theory has become increasingly bifurcated into two mutually incompatible styles of theorizing that I label formalist and behavioral-realist. Formalism favors mathematization and proposes an instrumentalist ontology of abstract processes while behavioral-realist theory takes at its basis the “real” physical individual endowed with concrete biological, cognitive and neurophysiological capacities and constraints and attempts to derive the proper conceptualization of social behavior from that basis. Formalism tends to lead toward a conceptually independent sociology that in principle requires only minimal reference to the empirical and ontological storehouse of other disciplines, while behavioral-realist theory leads to an interdisciplinary sociology that can be located within a hierarchy of behavioral sciences, leading to questions regarding the relationship between sociology and other disciplines as well as issues of transdisciplinary unification and possible interdisciplinary reduction. I explore the consequences of this split for the project of explanatory sociological theory within the context of how it has manifested itself in sociological network theory and social psychology. I close with a critique and assessment of formalist tendencies in sociological theorizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brain processes and social processes are not as separated as many of our Social Psychology and Neuroscience departments. This paper discusses the potential contribution of social neuroscience to the development of a multi-level, dynamic, and context-sensitive approach to prejudice. Specifically, the authors review research on event related potentials during social bias, stereotypes, and social attitudes measurements, showing that electrophysiological methods are powerful tools for analyzing the temporal fine-dynamics of psychological processes involved in implicit and explicit prejudice. Meta-theoretical implications are drawn regarding the social psychological modeling of social attitudes, and for the integration of social neuroscience into a multi-level account of cultural behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People use social categories to perceive and interact with the social world. Different categorizations often share similar cognitive, affective and behavioral features. This leads to a hypothesis of the common representational forms of social categorization. Studies in social categorization often use the terms 'ingroup' and 'outgroup' without clear conceptualization of the terms. I argue that the ingroup/outgroup distinction should be treated as an elementary relational ego-centric form of social categorization based on specific cognitive mechanisms. Such an abstract relational form should produce specific effects irrespective of the nature of a particular social category. The article discusses theoretical grounds for this hypothesis as well as empirical evidence from behavioral and brain research. It is argued that what is commonly termed as 'ingroup' and 'outgroup' can be produced by distinct cognitive operations based on similarity assessment and coalitional computation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theorists about love typically downplay the scale of persistent and possibly intractable disagreement about love. Where they have considered such disagreements at all, they have tended to treat them as an example of the lack of clarity surrounding the concept of love, a problem which can be resolved by philosophical analysis. In doing so, they invariably slip into prescriptive mode and offer moral injunctions in the guise of conceptual analyses. This article argues for philosophical modesty. I propose that the starting point of any coherent philosophical investigation of love must be a willingness to take our disagreements seriously. These disagreements stem from profound moral differences: we disagree about love inasmuch as we disagree about how we should properly treat one another. With a series of examples drawn from philosophy, literature and real life I attempt to illustrate some of the disagreements that arise in relation to erotic love. Drawing upon the work of Wittgenstein, Friedrich Waissman and W.B. Gallie, I suggest that any robust theory of love needs to take account of its contestable nature and the integral role it plays in our moral life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The word ‘pseudoscience’ is a marker of changing worries about science and being a scientist. It played an important role in the philosophical debate on demarcating science from other activities, and was used in popular writings to distance science from cranky theories with scientific pretensions. These uses consolidated a comforting unity in science, a communal space from which pseudoscience is excluded, and the user's right to belong is asserted. The urgency of this process dwindled when attempts to find a formal demarcation petered out, and the growth of social constructionism denied science any special access to truth. The reaction to this led to the science wars, which ushered in a new anxiety in the use of ‘pseudoscience’, especially from the least secure branches. But recent writings on the disunity of science reveal how the sense of support drawn from it may be based on an illusion, creating a disunity of pseudoscience as well as of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the historical abandonment of the distinctive conception of the social dimensions of cognition, emotion and behavior embraced by American social psychologists in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is suggested that part of the reason why the original conception of the social was abandoned by American psychologists was because of its association with theories of the “group mind,” the apparent threat it posed to cherished principles of rationality and autonomy, and the impoverished conception of the social inherited from European crowd theorists that came to inform the experimental study of social groups. It is suggested that while these factors partly explain the neglect of the social in American social psychology, none represent particularly good reasons for abandoning the original conception of the social. Consequently there are in principle no impediments to the revival of the theoretical and experimental study of the social dimensions of cognition, emotion and behavior in contemporary American social psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]