scholarly journals The Debate of Minimizing Subjectivity in Gender Studies: A Critical Analysis

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 164
Author(s):  
Madiha Nadeem
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Gender Studies ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Cultural Perspective ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
Systematic Knowledge

The social sciences have always been contested on the philosophical and ethical grounds of producing scientific knowledge. Similarly, the standpoints of Gender studies are analytically linked to certain domains of reasoning for human behavior. It discusses social phenomena from a societal and cultural perspective, which raises questions for the scholars of this subject about the application of particular procedures for understanding realities guided by some ideologies (Söderlund & Madison, 2017). This article critically evaluates the theoretical debate on ways of upholding the objectivity in this discipline by minimizing the role of subjectivity in the construction of new knowledge. It is concluded that by adopting techniques such as bracketing, triangulation, reflexivity and various other theoretical stands mentioned by scholars, feminists, and social scientists, the struggle of producing objective systematic knowledge can be promoted in gender studies and other social sciences.

Morality and the Social Sciences

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert O. Hirschman
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Moral Values ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Social

This chapter attempts to identify the tension between morality and the social sciences and recognize its inescapable centrality—and in that way have social scientists think more openly about their commitments. It turns to questions on the role of moral considerations and concerns in economics, and, more generally, to what can be said about the “problem of morality in the social sciences.” This chapter suggests some ways of reconciling the traditional posture of the economist as a “detached scientist” with their role as a morally concerned person, and shows why there is a contemporary increase of concern with moral values, even within the field of economics.

Determinism, Predictions, and Probabilism

2021 ◽  
pp. 85-88
Author(s):  
Francois Dépelteau
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Biological Determinism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
Social Cause ◽  
Social Causes ◽  
The Universe

This chapter addresses determinism, which has been the predominant mode of perceiving the universe in modern sciences. The basic assumption is that any event is the effect of an external cause. Generally speaking, biological determinism focuses on the biological causes of events, whereas social sciences focus on the social causes. This mode of perceiving the social universe is typically associated with positivism and, more specifically, social naturalism — or the idea that there is no significant difference between social phenomena and natural phenomena. In this logic, it is assumed that social scientists can and should discover ‘social laws’ — or universal relations of causality between a social cause and a social effect. However, determinism in the social sciences has been criticized since its very beginning. In response to these critiques, many social scientists have adopted various forms of ‘soft’ determinism. The chapter then considers social predictions and probabilism.

Capitalist Social Reproduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 320-340
Author(s):  
Martha E. Gimenez
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
First Century ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Abstract Feature

This entry will look at Marx’s theoretical contributions to social reproduction in relationship to critical assessments of his alleged “neglect” of reproduction and to the development of the social sciences, particularly the “radical” social sciences that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and continued to develop ever since. Marx, as well as Engels, offered important insights for understanding social reproduction as an abstract feature of human societies that, however, can only be fully understood in its historically specific context (i.e., in the context of the interface between modes of production and social formations). Social reproduction in the twenty-first century is capitalist social reproduction, inherently contradictory, as successful struggles for the reproduction of the working classes, for example, do not necessarily challenge capitalism. Finally, this article argues that radical social scientists, because they identify the capitalist foundations of the social phenomena they study, have made important contributions to the study of capitalist reproduction.

Feminism and social science

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Wylie
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Theoretical Basis ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Feminist Activism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Contextual Values ◽  
Second Wave

Feminists have two sorts of interest in the social sciences. With the advent of the second-wave women’s movement, they developed wide-ranging critiques of gender bias in the conceptual framework and methodology, as well as in the goals, institutions and practice of virtually all the social sciences; they argue that the social sciences both reflect and contribute to the sexism of the larger societies in which they are embedded. Alongside these critiques feminist practitioners have established constructive programmes of research that are intended to rectify the inadequacies of existing traditions of research and to address questions of concern to women. In this they are committed both to improving the disciplines in which they participate and to establishing a sound empirical and theoretical basis for feminist activism. This engagement of feminists with social science, as commentators and practitioners, raises a number of philosophical issues that have been addressed by feminist social scientists and philosophers. These include questions about ideals of objectivity and the role of contextual values in social scientific inquiry, the goals of feminist research, the forms of practice appropriate to these goals, and the responsibilities of feminist researchers to the subjects of inquiry and to those who may otherwise be affected by its conduct or results.

scholarly journals Ontology, neural networks, and the social sciences

Synthese ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Strohmaier
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Neural Networks ◽  
Statistical Models ◽  
Internal Representation ◽  
Representation Learning ◽  
Machine Learning Techniques ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Ontological Commitments ◽  
The Social

AbstractThe ontology of social objects and facts remains a field of continued controversy. This situation complicates the life of social scientists who seek to make predictive models of social phenomena. For the purposes of modelling a social phenomenon, we would like to avoid having to make any controversial ontological commitments. The overwhelming majority of models in the social sciences, including statistical models, are built upon ontological assumptions that can be questioned. Recently, however, artificial neural networks (ANNs) have made their way into the social sciences, raising the question whether they can avoid controversial ontological assumptions. ANNs are largely distinguished from other statistical and machine learning techniques by being a representation-learning technique. That is, researchers can let the neural networks select which features of the data to use for internal representation instead of imposing their preconceptions. On this basis, I argue that neural networks can avoid ontological assumptions to a greater degree than common statistical models in the social sciences. I then go on, however, to establish that ANNs are not ontologically innocent either. The use of ANNs in the social sciences introduces ontological assumptions typically in at least two ways, via the input and via the architecture.

Model-based Clustering and Typologies in the Social Sciences

2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
John S. Ahlquist ◽  
Christian Breunig
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Learning Tools ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Model Based Clustering ◽  
Model Based ◽  
Comparison Research ◽  
Conflicting Evidence ◽  
The Social ◽  
Case Comparison

Social scientists spend considerable energy constructing typologies and discussing their roles in measurement. Less discussed is the role of typologies in evaluating and revising theoretical arguments. We argue that unsupervised machine learning tools can be profitably applied to the development and testing of theory-based typologies. We review recent advances in mixture models as applied to cluster analysis and argue that these tools are particularly important in the social sciences where it is common to claim that high-dimensional objects group together in meaningful clusters. Model-based clustering (MBC) grounds analysis in probability theory, permitting the evaluation of uncertainty and application of information-based model selection tools. We show that the MBC approach forces analysts to consider dimensionality problems that more traditional clustering tools obscure. We apply MBC to the “varieties of capitalism,” a typology receiving significant attention in political science and economic sociology. We find weak and conflicting evidence for the theory's expected grouping. We therefore caution against the current practice of including typology-derived dummy variables in regression and case-comparison research designs.

A Measure of Judgments – Wilhelm Röpke’s Methodological Heresy

ORDO ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2018 (69) ◽  
pp. 35-50
Author(s):  
Kevin Christ
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Value Judgments ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Moral Framework ◽  
The Social

AbstractAs early as 1932, Wilhelm Röpke’s social diagnosis of historical liberalism was coupled with a methodological critique of his own discipline, one in which he sought to revisit what seemed to have become settled business: the role of value judgments in social science. His interpretation of the collapse of cultural liberalism included a sense of culpability on the part of social scientists who had not been, in his view, strong enough in their defense of a moral framework within which cultural liberalism could survive. Yet the positivist movement in social science, because of its interpretation of Max Weber’s proscription, had consciously treated value statements as unscientific. Röpke’s arguments regarding the need to “re-orient” the social sciences were anti-positivist, and his correspondence with colleagues reflects that. They were views that he held to the end of his career and are an important part of our understanding of what came to be known as Röpke’s economic humanism.

“We Have to Figure Out Where We Lost People”

2018 ◽  
pp. 142-164
Author(s):  
Victoria Smolkin
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Spiritual Needs ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Social ◽  
Scientific Atheism ◽  
Soviet Population ◽  
Ideological Work

This chapter examines how the atheist apparatus mobilized the social sciences in order to map patterns of Soviet secularization and understand religious modernization. It first considers the revival of the social sciences and social scientists' role in ideological work before discussing the research carried out by the Institute of Scientific Atheism (INA), especially on the religiosity of the Soviet population. It then explores how atheists tried to figure out how atheism could fulfill spiritual needs in order to develop a positive foundation for atheism, as well as their focus on the role of families and their realization that emotions played a key role in religion. Finally, it describes the Penza project and its claim that the social sciences could be harnessed to finally produce an effective plan for achieving “a society free of religion”.

The Transformation of Science in the XX Century

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 20-29
Author(s):  
Alexander L. Nikiforov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Nature Of Science ◽  
Scientific Activity ◽  
Professional Orientation ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Task ◽  
Understanding Of Science ◽  
Century Science

The first part of the article examines the views on the nature of science and the activities of the scientists, on a role of science in the life of society, expressed in the works of the greatest scientists of the late-early 20th centuries – E. Mach, A. Poincare and M. Weber. It is shown that certain differences in the understanding of science and its development between these thinkers were due to their professional orientation. While Mach and Poincare, speaking of science, had in mind, above all, a mathematized natural science, Weber focused on the social sciences, which were only at the beginning of their development. The second part of the article shows that during the twentieth century science experienced a significant transformation, which was due to three interrelated factors. First, research has become widely funded by business and government. Secondly, large scientific teams come to take the place of single scientists, whose members perform only narrow-specific functions in solving a scientific task. Finally, business and the state orient science toward solving applied problems, i.e. to develop new technical devices. As a result, the main goal of scientific activity is not the search for truth, but the improvement of technology, new knowledge is only a by-product of technical progress.

scholarly journals Czy socjologowie są w stanie budować maszyny społeczne? Rekonceptualizacja różnicy między przyrodoznawstwem a naukami społecznymi

2009 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-44
Author(s):  
Łukasz Afeltowicz ◽  
Krzysztof Pietrowicz
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Traditional Philosophy ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Difference

The last three decades have witnessed a dynamic development of science and technology studies, which have shown science in a way completely different from that presented by the traditional philosophy of science and methodology of social sciences. The authors accept that the findings of those studies concerning the mechanisms of functioning of science are correct and attempt to address again the problem of the difference between those disciplines and the social sciences. Their analysis concerns: the role and importance of laboratories in the social sciences; the “transition” of social phenomena to those laboratories; the possibility of popularization by the social sciences of technological solutions prepared by those laboratories; an incorrect approach to experiment and the acceptance of false ideas of the function of natural sciences by social scientists.

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