scholarly journals An impossibility result on methodological individualism

Author(s):  
Hein Duijf ◽  
Allard Tamminga ◽  
Frederik Van De Putte

AbstractMethodological individualists often claim that any social phenomenon can ultimately be explained in terms of the actions and interactions of individuals. Any Nagelian version of methodological individualism requires that there be bridge laws that translate social statements into individualistic ones. We show that Nagelian individualism can be put to logical scrutiny by making the relevant social and individualistic languages fully explicit and mathematically precise. In particular, we prove that the social statement that a group of (at least two) agents performs a deontically admissible group action cannot be expressed in a well-established deontic logic of agency that models every combination of actions, omissions, abilities, and obligations of finitely many individual agents.

Author(s):  
Marcio Luis Costa ◽  
Alex Silva Messias

Nas últimas décadas se observa o retorno da religião sob forma de fundamentalismo religioso, utilizando a mídia e instrumentos de pressão política para fazer valer suas crenças, pois diante do receio ao questionamento, os fundamentalistas veem no “outro”, no diferente, uma ameaça a ser combatida e, em alguns casos, extirpada para preservar suas convicções. O presente estudo tem por objetivo discutir as tendências sócio-políticas do fundamentalismo religioso cristão. Para tanto, com método bibliográfico narrativo, visitamos alguns autores em nível nacional e internacional, que abordam as condições que fizeram emergir o fenômeno social do fundamentalismo religioso, sua estruturação e atuação, até suas demandas sócio-políticas. Os resultados apontam que quando se identifica e transfere qualquer responsabilidade pessoal e histórica para as forças externas, o “outro”, entendido como pessoa e/ou instituição, não podemos negar que esse processo alcança dimensões de problema social. Notamos algumas tendências como mudança de movimento religioso para ideologia acirrada, da postura de fiel para militância, do “ad intra” das religiões para demandas “ad extra”, dos altares e púlpitos para ocupações políticas.Palavras-chave: Fundamentalismo Religioso; Protestante; Católico. CHRISTIAN RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM: SOCIAL-POLITICS TENDENCIESAbstractIn the last decades the return of religion in religious fundamentalism form can be observed, using media and instruments of political pressure, because when facing the fear of questioning, fundamentalists see in the “other”, in the different, a threat to be stopped and, in some cases, extirpated top preserve their convictions.  This study aims to discuss the social-politics tendencies of the Christian religious fundamentalism. For that, with the narrative bibliographic method, we visited some authors of national and international level, that approach the conditions that caused the emergence of the religious fundamentalism social phenomenon, its structure and role, until its social-politics demand. The results show that when any personal or historical responsibility is identified and transferred to external forces, the “other”, understood as person and/or institution, we cannot deny this process reaches dimensions of social problem. We notice some tendencies such as the change of the religious movement to fierce ideology, from the posture of faithful to militancy, from “ad intra” of religions to “ad extra” demands, from the altars and pulpits to political positions.Keywords: Religious Fundamentalism; Protestant; Catholic.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-15
Author(s):  
Pier Matteo Barone ◽  
Rosa Maria Di Maggio ◽  
Silvia Mesturini

Despite widespread concern over missing persons, there has always been little clarity on what the word “missing” means. Although the category of young runaways is, indeed, an important cluster, other popular concepts related to disappearances describe a portion of missing persons. Thus, the following question persists: What exactly does “missing” mean? In this brief communication, we would like to open a discussion about the social phenomenon of missing persons and the consequent deployment of people and techniques to find those persons. In particular, the benefits of some forensic geoarchaeological approaches that are not yet fully standardized will be highlighted, such as geographic profiling and the use of multispectral satellite images, in order to provide materials for future searching protocols.


2021 ◽  
pp. 147821032110320
Author(s):  
Ann Christin Eklund Nilsen ◽  
Ove Skarpenes

Histories of statistics and quantification have demonstrated that systems of statistical knowledge participate in the construction of the objects that are measured. However, the pace, purpose, and scope of quantification in state bureaucracy have expanded greatly over the past decades, fuelled by (neoliberal) societal trends that have given the social phenomenon of quantification a central place in political discussions and in the public sphere. This is particularly the case in the field of education. In this article, we ask what is at stake in state bureaucracy, professional practice, and individual pupils as quantification increasingly permeates the education field. We call for a theoretical renewal in order to understand quantification as a social phenomenon in education. We propose a sociology-of-knowledge approach to the phenomenon, drawing on different theoretical traditions in the sociology of knowledge in France (Alain Desrosières and Laurent Thévenot), England (Barry Barnes and Donald MacKenzie), and Canada (Ian Hacking), and argue that the ongoing quantification practice at different levels of the education system can be understood as cultural processes of self-fulfilling prophecies.


Author(s):  
Michael H. Glantz ◽  
Gregory E. Pierce

AbstractCurrent discussions of the social phenomenon of “vaccine hesitancy” with regard to Covid-19 provide an opportunity to use hesitancy as a means to shift thinking about untimely and delayed responses to forecasts of hydrometeorological hazards. Hesitancy, that is, provides a paradigm through which such regrettably delayed responses to hydromet hazards might be better understood and effectively addressed. Without exaggeration, just about every hydromet event provides an example of how hesitancy hinders individual, community, and national government risk-reducing preventive and mitigative responses to forecasts of foreseeable, relatively near-term climate, water, or weather hazards. Reasons for such hesitancy (for vaccine and forecast use alike) include—among others—lack of trust in the science, lack of confidence in government, and persistent concern about the uncertainties that surround forecasting—both meteorological and public health. As such, a better understanding of the causes that lead to individual and group hesitancy can better inform hydromet forecasters and affected communities about ways in which beneficial actions in response to timely forecasts are often delayed. This better understanding will facilitate, where necessary, targeted interventions to enhance the societal value of forecasting by reducing this long-observed challenge of “forecast hesitancy.” First, this article focuses on incidents of “vaccine hesitancy” that, for various reasons, people around the world are even now experiencing with regard to several now-available, and confirmed efficacious, Covid-19 vaccines. Reports of such incidents of indecisiveness first increased dramatically over the first few months of 2021, despite the strong scientific confidence that vaccination would significantly lower personal risk of contracting as well as spreading the virus. After, the notion of forecast hesitancy with regard to hydrometeorological hazards is discussed.It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear.-Frank Luntz (2007)


Sociology ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristian Frisk

The article discusses four dominant perspectives in the sociology of heroism: the study of great men; hero stories; heroic actions; and hero institutions. The discussion ties together heroism and fundamental sociological debates about the relationship between the individual and the social order; it elucidates the socio-psychological, cultural/ideational and socio-political structuring of heroism, which challenges the tendency to understand people, actions and events as naturally, or intrinsically, heroic; and it points to a theoretical trajectory within the literature, which has moved from very exclusive to more inclusive conceptualisations of a hero. After this discussion, the article examines three problematic areas in the sociology of heroism: the underlying masculine character of heroism; the presumed disappearance of the hero with modernisation; and the principal idea of heroism as a pro-social phenomenon. The article calls for a more self-conscious engagement with this legacy, which could stimulate dialogue across different areas of sociological research.


2005 ◽  
Vol 16 (02) ◽  
pp. 259-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
SANTO FORTUNATO

In the consensus model of Krause–Hegselmann, opinions are real numbers between 0 and 1, and two agents are compatible if the difference of their opinions is smaller than the confidence bound parameter ∊. A randomly chosen agent takes the average of the opinions of all neighboring agents which are compatible with it. We propose a conjecture, based on numerical evidence, on the value of the consensus threshold ∊c of this model. We claim that ∊c can take only two possible values, depending on the behavior of the average degree d of the graph representing the social relationships, when the population N approaches infinity: if d diverges when N→∞, ∊c equals the consensus threshold ∊i~0.2 on the complete graph; if instead d stays finite when N→∞, ∊c =1/2 as for the model of Deffuant et al.


2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 18
Author(s):  
Dudy Syafruddin

Literature is a product of culture keeping abreast of human mind. Literary works is a means for the authors to express the social phenomenon in his life. The discourses about postmodernism in the second half of twentieth century, as a part of the story of human mind, was a profound interest for the Authors. In Indonesia, the postmodern discourse has come up in the 1960s. This paper involves the elements of Postmodernism in the short story “Abacadabra” written by Danarto. The dominant elements in this short story are parody, fragmentary, and historiographic metafiction.


Humaniora ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 173
Author(s):  
Rahmat Edi Irawan

Article was aimed to reveal how both positive and negative sides of competition among television stations in Indonesia was seen from their programs seen by television viewers. The study used qualitative methods to get an overview of the phenomena occurring at the social phenomenon. Data were collected by observation and documentary. Observations were made to the programs presented by various television stations, while the documentary was to process data and share ratings released by AGB Nielsen throughout the year 2011.  The results show that the competitions between television stations happened today have not presented many positive sides from the viewers because of the limited programs offered in Indonesia. In fact, many programs are aired only a repeatation of the previous successful ones. 


Author(s):  
Oleg Gribunov ◽  
Gennady Nebratenko ◽  
Evgeny Bezruchko ◽  
Elena Millerova

The authors examine the specific features of criminal law assessment of involvement in prostitution and the organization of this activity through the use or the threat of violence. At the beginning, they stress the urgency of counteracting the social phenomenon of prostitution, analyze the very concept of «prostitution», its debatable and problematic aspects, because it is impossible to offer a correct qualification of criminal actions connected with prostitution (crimes under Art. 240 and 241 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) without determining the boundaries of providing sexual services specifically referring to the term «prostitution». It is concluded that the key problem for determining the scope of sexual actions described by the term «prostitution» is the lack of an official definition of this term in Russian legislation as well as a wide variety of services in the modern sex industry. The authors state that the understanding of prostitution as a historical social phenomenon as a situation when a woman provides sexual services to different men by performing sexual acts with them for previously discussed material compensation is outdated and does not reflect the multiple dimensions of modern prostitution. While researching the issues of qualifying criminal acts connected with prostitution and involving the use or the threat of violence within the framework of this article, the authors have analyzed the work of both Russian and foreign scholars and studied examples of investigation and court practice. They examine the problems of legal assessment of criminal law categories «violence» and «the threat of using violence» regarding publically dangerous actions connected with the involvement in prostitution and the organization of this activity. The authors present the criteria of differentiating between corpus delicti where such actions are criminally punishable and other corpus delicti, as well as the cases that require qualification for multiple crimes. The results of this research allowed the authors to work out and present recommendations on qualifying criminal actions connected with prostitution and involving the use of the threat of violence.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document