Truth and Social Science

Truth and Social Science PDF Author: Ross Abbinnett
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9781446239384
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book Here

Book Description
This exciting and accessible guide to the discussions of truth in the social sciences can also be read as an account of the collapse of modernity, and the rise of new forms of thought which treat difference and ambivalence as positive values. Ross Abbinnett traces the debate on truth from the objectifying powers' of Kant through more than 200 years of critique and reformulation to the unravelling of truth by Lyotard, Foucault and Derrida.

Truth and Social Science

Truth and Social Science PDF Author: Ross Abbinnett
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9781446239384
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book Here

Book Description
This exciting and accessible guide to the discussions of truth in the social sciences can also be read as an account of the collapse of modernity, and the rise of new forms of thought which treat difference and ambivalence as positive values. Ross Abbinnett traces the debate on truth from the objectifying powers' of Kant through more than 200 years of critique and reformulation to the unravelling of truth by Lyotard, Foucault and Derrida.

A Social History of Truth

A Social History of Truth PDF Author: Steven Shapin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226750191
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 516

Get Book Here

Book Description
A Social History of Truth is a bold theoretical and historical exploration of the social conditions that make knowledge possible in any period and in any endeavor.

Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power

Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power PDF Author: Lisa Anderson
Publisher: Leonard Hastings Schoff Lectur
ISBN: 9780231126076
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 158

Get Book Here

Book Description
The conditions that shaped the rise and expansion of American social science are rapidly changing, and with them, the terms of its relationship with power and policy. As globalization has diminished the role of the state as the locus of public policy in favor of NGOs, multinational corporations and other private entities, it has raised important questions about the future of the social sciences and their universalist pretensions. As dean of Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, Lisa Anderson has a unique vantage point on the intersection of social sciences, particularly political science, and public-policy formation and implementation. How do, or should, the research and findings of the academy affect foreign or domestic policy today? Why are politicians often quick to dismiss professors as irrelevant, their undertakings purely "academic", while scholars often shrink from engagement as agents of social or political change? There is a tension at work here, and it reveals a deeper compromise that arose as the modern social sciences were born in the nursery of late nineteenth century American liberalism: social scientists would dedicate themselves to the pursuit of objective, empirically verifiable truth, while relinquishing the exercise of power to governments and their agents. Anderson argues that this compromise helped underwrite the expansion of American influence in the twentieth century, and that it needs serious reexamination at the dawn of the twenty-first.

Social Science for What?

Social Science for What? PDF Author: Mark Solovey
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262358751
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 409

Get Book Here

Book Description
How the NSF became an important yet controversial patron for the social sciences, influencing debates over their scientific status and social relevance. In the early Cold War years, the U.S. government established the National Science Foundation (NSF), a civilian agency that soon became widely known for its dedication to supporting first-rate science. The agency's 1950 enabling legislation made no mention of the social sciences, although it included a vague reference to "other sciences." Nevertheless, as Mark Solovey shows in this book, the NSF also soon became a major--albeit controversial--source of public funding for them.

Duped

Duped PDF Author: Timothy R. Levine
Publisher: University Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817359680
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Get Book Here

Book Description
A scrupulous account that overturns many commonplace notions about how we can best detect lies and falsehoods From the advent of fake news to climate-science denial and Bernie Madoff’s appeal to investors, people can be astonishingly gullible. Some people appear authentic and sincere even when the facts discredit them, and many people fall victim to conspiracy theories and economic scams that should be dismissed as obviously ludicrous. This happens because of a near-universal human tendency to operate within a mindset that can be characterized as a “truth-default.” We uncritically accept most of the messages we receive as “honest.” We all are perceptually blind to deception. We are hardwired to be duped. The question is, can anything be done to militate against our vulnerability to deception without further eroding the trust in people and social institutions that we so desperately need in civil society? Timothy R. Levine’s Duped: Truth-Default Theory and the Social Science of Lying and Deception recounts a decades-long program of empirical research that culminates in a new theory of deception—truth-default theory. This theory holds that the content of incoming communication is typically and uncritically accepted as true, and most of the time, this is good. Truth-default allows humans to function socially. Further, because most deception is enacted by a few prolific liars, the so called “truth-bias” is not really a bias after all. Passive belief makes us right most of the time, but the catch is that it also makes us vulnerable to occasional deceit. Levine’s research on lie detection and truth-bias has produced many provocative new findings over the years. He has uncovered what makes some people more believable than others and has discovered several ways to improve lie-detection accuracy. In Duped, Levine details where these ideas came from, how they were tested, and how the findings combine to produce a coherent new understanding of human deception and deception detection.

Executing Truth

Executing Truth PDF Author: Stuart Weierter
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793603324
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 215

Get Book Here

Book Description
With the increasing use of algorithms to govern public life, a proliferation of promises surrounding ‘big data,’ and an ever tighter union of academic specialists and the state bureaucracy, we are, it seems, on our way to an administrative utopia. At what cost, though? Executing Truth critically appraises this reformation of politics by way of the social sciences. It argues that what is lost with this reformation is a deeper consideration of the problematic relation of truth to politics; a problem which cuts deeper than any social science might plumb. In seeking to recover what is lost, this book offers a comprehensive study of the problem. The author works his way back from the debates in politically applied social science (or policy science) to the foundational thinkers. These include Harold Lasswell, John Dewey, Max Weber, and Georg Hegel. At the end of this journey, Executing Truth calls for a return to the everyday (or the most comprehensive basis for distinguishing between theoretical perspectives), and outlines the implications of this return for those political advisors – state executive actors – tasked with ‘speaking truth to power.’

How Does Social Science Work?

How Does Social Science Work? PDF Author: Paul Diesing
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822971534
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 430

Get Book Here

Book Description
The culmination of a lifetime spent in a variety of fields - sociology, anthropology, economics, psychology, and philosophy of science - How Does Social Science Work? takes an innovative, sometimes iconoclastic look at social scientists at work in many disciplines. It describes how they investigate and the kinds of truth they produce, illuminating the weaknesses and dangers inherent in their research.At once an analysis, a critique, and a synthesis, this major study begins by surveying philosophical approaches to hermeneutics, to examine the question of how social science ought to work. It illustrates many of its arguments with untraditional examples, such as the reception of the work of the political biographer Robert Caro to show the hermeneutical problems of ethnographers. The major part of the book surveys sociological, political, and psychological studies of social science to get a rounded picture of how social science works,Paul Diesling warns that "social science exists between two opposite kinds of degeneration, a value-free professionalism that lives only for publications that show off the latest techniques, and a deep social concern that uses science for propaganda." He argues for greater self-awareness and humility among social scientists, although he notes that "some social scientists . . . will angrily reject the thought that their personality affects their research in any way."This profound and sometimes witty book will appeal to students and practitioners in the social sciences who are ready to take a fresh look at their field. An extensive bibliography provides a wealth of references across an array of social science disciplines.

The Logic of Social Science

The Logic of Social Science PDF Author: James Mahoney
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691214956
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 410

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Mahoney's starting point is the problem of essentialism in social science. Essentialism--the belief that the members of a category possess hidden properties ("essences") that make them members of the category and that endow them with a certain nature--is appropriate for scientific categories ("atoms", for instance) but not for human ones ("revolutions," for instance). Despite this, much social science research takes place from within an essentialist orientation; those who reject this assumption goes so far in the other direction as to reject the idea of an external reality, independent of human beings, altogether. Mahoney proposes an alternative approach that aspires to bridge this enduring rift in the social sciences between those who take a scientific approach and assume that social science categories correspond to external reality (and thus believe that the methods used in the natural sciences are generally appropriate for the social sciences) and those who take a constructivist approach and believe that because the categories used to understand the social world are humanly-constructed, they cannot possibly follow the science of the natural world. As the name suggests, scientific constructivism brings in aspects of both views and attempts to unite them. Drawing from cognitive science, it focuses on using the rational parts of our brain machinery to overcome the limitations and deeply seated biases (such as essentialism) of our evolved minds. Specifically, Mahoney puts forth a "set-theoretic analysis" that focuses on "sets" of categories as they exist in the mind that are also subject to the mathematical logic of set-theory. He spends the first four chapters of the book establishing the foundations and methods for set-theoretic analysis, the next four chapters looking and how this analysis fits with the existing tools of social science, and the final four chapters focusing on how this approach can be used to study and understand cases"--

Readings in the Philosophy of Social Science

Readings in the Philosophy of Social Science PDF Author: Michael Martin
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262631518
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 818

Get Book Here

Book Description
the first comprehensive anthology in the philosophy of social science to appear since the late 1960s

Making Truth

Making Truth PDF Author: Theodore L. Brown
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252028106
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
A new perspective on how scientists reason about the world, design and interpret experiments and communicate with one another and with the larger society outside science.