John Stuart Mill as a social science founder

John Stuart Mill was Britain's leading thinker when it came to issues having to do with logic and scientific knowledge in the mid-nineteenth century. His System of Logic was first published in 1843 and was reprinted in numerous editions, and it constituted a comprehensive treatment of scientific knowledge and inference within the empiricist tradition. The book devoted an entire section to the logic of what Mill referred to as the "moral sciences" (Book VI, published separately as The Logic of the Moral Sciences). He defined the moral sciences as those areas of study having to do with human dispositions, character, and action, extending from psychology to social science. The conception of social science knowledge that he presents has had...

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Posted in: CAT_foundations,methodological individualism,Mill,positivism,segregation

Revisiting Popper

Karl Popper's most commonly cited contribution to philosophy and the philosophy of science is his theory of falsifiability (The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge). (Stephen Thornton has a very nice essay on Popper's philosophy in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.) In its essence, this theory is an alternative to "confirmation theory." Contrary to positivist philosophy of science, Popper doesn't think that scientific theories can be confirmed by more and more positive empirical evidence. Instead, he argues that the logic of scientific research is a critical method in which scientists do their best to "falsify" their hypotheses and theories. And we are rationally justified...

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Posted in: CAT_methodology,complexity,history,holism

Patient safety -- Canada and France

Patient safety is a key issue in managing and assessing a regional or national health system. There are very sizable variations in patient safety statistics across hospitals, with significantly higher rates of infection and mortality in some institutions than others. Why is this? And what can be done in order to improve the safety performance of low-safety institutions, and to improve the overall safety performance of the hospital environment nationally?Previous posts have made the point that safety is the net effect of a complex system within a hospital or chemical plant, including institutions, rules, practices, training, supervision, and day-to-day behavior by staff and supervisors (post, post). And experts on hospital safety agree that...

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Posted in: CAT_institutions,failure,France,regulatory regime,safety

Social mobility?

We often think of the United States as a place with a lot of social mobility. What exactly does this mean? And is it true? Ironically, the answer appears to be a fairly decisive "no." In fact, here's a graph from a 2005 New York Times series on income mobility that shows that the United States ranks second to last among Great Britain, US, France, Canada, and Denmark when it comes to the rate of income improvement over four generations for poor families. And here are two very interesting recent studies that come to similar conclusions -- a report on social mobility by the Center for American Progress and a 2007 academic study by researchers at Kent State, Wisconsin and Syracuse. Here is how Professor Kathryn Wilson, associate professor...

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Posted in: CAT_policy,CAT_power,class consciousness,inequality

Public opinion--an example

This posting is a thought experiment that is an effort to probe the underlying components of "public opinion." I've created 8 sample data sets that I have normalized to a 1-5 scale; I've interpreted the scores as a Likert scale (from strongly disagree to strongly agree); I've assumed that each data set represents a distinct sub-population within a mass population; and I've examined the disaggregated and aggregated results in a simple spreadsheet model. This is an effort to push the questions raised in an earlier post a bit further: how do the tools of survey research allow us to answer questions about how a mass population thinks and feels about a given set of issues? The central observation there was that public opinion needs to be disaggregated...

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Posted in: CAT_methodology,public opinion

What is a diasporic community?

There are many diaspora populations in the world: the African diaspora, with populations in the Caribbean, North and South America, and Europe; the Chinese diaspora, from Indonesia and Malaysia to Cuba and the United States and Canada; the Jewish diaspora, from eastern Europe and Spain across all of Europe, to South Africa and North America with historical enclaves in India and China; and so on for numerous national and cultural groups. In some instances these groups maintain a strong sense of collective identity in spite of the physical and social distances that separate various sub-populations, and in some instances the strands of identity have attenuated significantly. The fact of diaspora is a deeply interesting one, in that it provides...

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Posted in: CAT_globalization,community,identity,Southeast Asia

What do Americans think?

Public opinion research raises many difficult questions. (See an earlier post on this topic.) We would like to know what Americans are thinking about current circumstances and issues; we'd like to know how those attitudes differ across social groups; and we'd like to have a basis for attempting to explain changes in attitudes over time. There is a vast amount of survey research underway at any given time in the United States. For example, the Pew Research Center (link) and the Roper Center (link) provide substantial survey research on social and political attitudes in the United States. But what does it really tell us?There are, of course, the normal statistical questions about the interpretation of results: what is a representative sample?...

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Posted in: CAT_epistemology,public opinion

A cognitivist philosophy of history

Many of the posts here have raised issues about the philosophy of history. Here is a bit of a synthesis of many of those prior observations.Fundamentally, we have unfolded a conception of historical explanation that derives from the central idea of situated human action; the idea, as Marx put the point in 1850, that “men make their own history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing.” In other words, historical explanation fundamentally involves identifying the features of agency and structure in the presence of which the great and minor events of history have transpired. Fundamentally historians are faced with the challenge of making sense of the choices that actors have made in bringing about the historical processes that interest...

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Posted in: CAT_history,history,philosophy

Internet activism in China

Guobin Yang's The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online is a boundary-breaking book. It is a sociology of the communities who use the internet in China; it is a contribution to the study of social movements; it is a history of a recent period of China's modern history during which internet activism became important; it is an ethnography of the wangmin -- "netizens"; and it is a snap review of some of the hottest issues in front of the Chinese public today -- environmental problems, corruption, exploitation of factory workers, abuse of power, and social inequalities. Much more than in North America or Western Europe, the internet functions as a location of social activism in China, according to Yang. And it serves an enormous...

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Posted in: CAT_China,CAT_collective action,communication,social movements