How Many White Races Are There?

Author(s):  
Kenneth Prewitt

This chapter looks at how America continually readjusted its color line when the economy's need for workers resulted in immigration-driven population growth but the polity required a monopoly of power in the hands of the “right” whites—that is, European Protestants. In the half century starting with the Civil War, the social sciences entered the scene, which gradually displaced the biologically based race science popular earlier in the nineteenth century. The social sciences embraced the statistical races as a key to informing policy makers across a broad range of issues including stopping the flow of the “wrong” European immigrants—Catholic and Jewish—without interfering with immigration from the ancestral Protestant Europe.

2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippe Fontaine

ArgumentFor more than thirty years after World War II, the unconventional economist Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) was a fervent advocate of the integration of the social sciences. Building on common general principles from various fields, notably economics, political science, and sociology, Boulding claimed that an integrated social science in which mental images were recognized as the main determinant of human behavior would allow for a better understanding of society. Boulding's approach culminated in the social triangle, a view of society as comprised of three main social organizers – exchange, threat, and love – combined in varying proportions. According to this view, the problems of American society were caused by an unbalanced combination of these three organizers. The goal of integrated social scientific knowledge was therefore to help policy makers achieve the “right” proportions of exchange, threat, and love that would lead to social stabilization. Though he was hopeful that cross-disciplinary exchanges would overcome the shortcomings of too narrow specialization, Boulding found that rather than being the locus of a peaceful and mutually beneficial exchange, disciplinary boundaries were often the occasion of conflict and miscommunication.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zachariah Basehore

For over a half-century, psychologists, educators, and researchers have criticized the common misusesof statistics in the social sciences. Here, I summarize some of the various objections to the blind use ofp-values and propose simple adjustments to 1) ameliorate the weaknesses inherent in current statisticalpractice, and 2) to paint a more complete picture of a study’s results.


2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 491-508
Author(s):  
Silvia Fernanda de Mendonça Figueirôa

Abstract Oscar Nerval de Gouvêa was a scientist and teacher in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, whose work spanned engineering, medicine, the social sciences, and law. This paper presents and discusses a manuscript entitled “Table of mineral classification,” which he appended to his dissertation Da receptividade mórbida , presented to the Faculty of Medicine in 1889. The foundations and features of the table provide a focus for understanding nineteenth-century mineralogy and its connections in Brazil at that time through this scientist. This text was Gouvêa’s contribution to the various mineral classification systems which have emerged from different parts of the world.


Author(s):  
Gabriel Rockhill

This chapter proposes a counter-history of a seminal debate in the transition from structuralism to post-structuralism. It calls into question the widespread assumption that Derrida rejects Foucault’s structuralist stranglehold by demonstrating that the meaning of a text always remains open. Through a meticulous examination of their respective historical paradigms, methodological orientations and hermeneutic parameters, it argues that Derrida’s critique of his former professor is, at the level of theoretical practice, a call to return to order. The ultimate conclusion is that the Foucault-Derrida debate has much less to do with Descartes’ text per se, than with the relationship between the traditional tasks of philosophy and the meta-theoretical reconfiguration of philosophic practice via the methods of the social sciences.


Author(s):  
Theodore M. Porter

This concluding chapter addresses how statistics has assumed the trappings of a modern academic discipline primarily during the last half century. The intellectual character of statistics had been thoroughly transformed by 1900. The period when statistical thinking was allied only to the simplest mathematics gave way to a period of statistical mathematics—which, to be sure, has not been divorced from thinking. In the twentieth century, statistics has at last assumed at least the appearance of conforming to that hierarchical structure of knowledge beloved by philosophers and sociologists in which theory governs practice and in which the “advanced” field of mathematics provides a solid foundation for the “less mature” biological and social sciences. The crystallization of a mathematical statistics out of the wealth of applications developed during the nineteenth century provides the natural culmination to this story.


2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (03) ◽  
pp. 616-618
Author(s):  
Diego Mazzoccone ◽  
Mariano Mosquera ◽  
Silvana Espejo ◽  
Mariana Fancio ◽  
Gabriela Gonzalez ◽  
...  

It is very difficult to date the birth of political science in Argentina. Unlike other discipline of the social sciences, in Argentina the first distinction can be made between political thought on the one hand, and political science in another. The debate over political thought—as the reflection of different political questions—emerged in our country in the nineteenth century, especially during the process of constructing the Argentine nation-state. Conversely, political science is defined in a general way as the application of the scientific method to the studies on the power of the state (Fernández 2001).


Author(s):  
Jonathan Payne

‘Skill’ has long been a contested concept within the social sciences. In recent decades, the use of the term by policy makers, employers and academics has broadened considerably, fuelling debate about what skill is and what constitutes skilled work. With ‘skill’ purportedly encompassing behaviours such as discipline and conformity, the concept is said to be in danger of losing its meaning or significance. The growth of interactive service work has also seen the emergence of new and controversial skill concepts such as emotional, aesthetic and articulation work. Are so-called ‘low skilled’ service jobs really low skilled and might recognition of these hidden skills help to achieve better pay, or is there a risk of exaggerating their skill content and raising unrealistic expectations? This chapter charts these controversies, and argues for placing skill in its societal and workplace context and taking seriously issues of power, job complexity and worker autonomy.


Author(s):  
Robert A. Segal

The ‘Introduction’ examines and compares modern theories of myth by applying them to the famous myth of Adonis. It is only in the modern era—specifically, only since the second half of the nineteenth century—that these theories have purported to be scientific, for only since then have there existed the social sciences. Of these, anthropology, psychology, and sociology have contributed the most to the study of myth. Each discipline harbours multiple theories of myth, but what unites them is the questions asked: those of origin, function, and subject matter. Is myth universal? Is myth true? Along with these other questions, it defines myth as a story.


1967 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 139
Author(s):  
Michael Barkun ◽  
Julius Stone

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