Contemporary Philosophy and Social Science: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue

Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Illustrations
Contributors
Preface
Introduction
	Methods
	Results
	Discussion
	How to Use This Book
Part One The Plurality of Approaches, Disciplines, and Theories
	1 Integration and the Disunity of the Social Sciences
		1.1 Introduction
		1.2 The Unity of the Social Sciences: A Failed Project
		1.3 Explanations of Crowds
			1.3.1 Crowd Psychology: Imitation and Contagion
			1.3.2 Rational Choice: Unintended and Intended Crowd Formation
			1.3.3 Network Science and the Ecology of Crowd Formation
		1.4 Diversity of Explanatory Tools and the Integration of Theories
			1.4.1 Fields in the Social Sciences as Explanatory Toolkits
			1.4.2 Integration and Pluralism
		1.5 Naturalism as an Integrative Stance
		1.6 Conclusion
	Commentary: Plurality and Pluralisms for the Social Sciences
		1. Plurality and Pluralism
		2. Varieties of Philosophical Pluralism
		3. Crowd Formation and Methodological Pluralism
		4. On the Integrative Stance: From Plurality to Pluralism, and Back
	2 The Eroding Artificial-Natural Distinction?
		2.1 Introduction
		2.2 The Artificial-Natural Distinction?
		2.3 Disciplinary Purity and the Artificial-Natural Distinction
			2.3.1 Ecology and Nonhuman Nature
			2.3.2 Economics and Human Society
			2.3.3 Bringing Things Together
		2.4 Case Studies of Entangled Phenomena
			2.4.1 Biodiversity: Urban Ecology and Biogeography
			2.4.2 Invasive Species in Yellowstone National Park
		2.5 Conclusion
	Commentary: Toward a Philosophy and Methodology for Interdisciplinary Research
		1. Introduction
		2. The Artificial-Natural Distinction
		3. Methodology of Interdisciplinary Science
		4. Conclusion
	3 Team Agency and Conditional Games
		3.1 Introduction
		3.2 Equilibium Selection and Team Reasoning
		3.3 Conditional Game Theory and Social Agency
		3.4 Conclusion
	Commentary: Explaining Prosocial Behavior: Team Reasoning or Social Influence?
		1. Social Preferences and the Explanation of Prosocial Behavior
		2. Comparison
			a. Explanatory Power
			b. Explanatory Potential
			c. Agent Properties
		3. Conclusion: Team Agency
Part Two From Methodological Choice to Methodological Mix
	4 The Methodologies of Behavioral Econometrics
		4.1 Best-Practice Econometric Methods
			4.1.1 Non-Structural Methods
			4.1.2 Structural Methods
		4.2 Behavioral Econometrics and Behavioral Welfare Economics
			4.2.1 Risk Preferences
			4.2.2 Welfare Evaluation
			4.2.3 The Welfare Metric
			4.2.4 Welfare Evaluation
			4.2.5 What Should the Normative Welfare Metric Be
		4.3 The Many Applications of Joint Estimation
			4.3.1 Time Preferences
			4.3.2 Subjective Probabilities
			4.3.3 Intertemporal Risk Preferences
			4.3.4 Social Preferences
			4.3.5 A General Lesson
		4.4 Just Read the Literature: A Case Study of CPT
		4.5 There Is a Reason We Compute Likelihoods: A Case Study of the PH
		4.6 Point Estimates Are Not Data: A Case Study of Source Dependence
		4.7 Conclusion: Where Are the Methodologists?
	Commentary: Reflections on Decision Research and Its Empiricism: Four Comments Inspired by Harrison
		1. Intuitions of Theorists
		2. Estranged Siblings
		3. All the Horses Are Dead, Long Live the Horse Race
		4. Do as Theorists Say (Not as Empiricists Do)
	5 Reasons for Using Mixed Methods in the Evaluation of Complex Projects
		5.1 Introduction
		5.2 The Complementary Strengths and Weaknesses of Different Methodological Approaches
		5.3 Understanding Impact Trajectories
		5.4 Integrating Qualitative and Quantitative Methods into “Complex” Project Evaluations
		5.5 Assessing the External Validity of Complex Interventions
			5.5.1 Causal Density18
			5.5.2 Implementation Capability
			5.5.3 “Reasoned Expectation”
		5.6 Conclusion
	Commentary: Why Mixed Methods Are Necessary for Evaluating Any Policy
		1. Introduction
		2. The Two Approaches
		3. The Intervention-Centered Approach
		4. The Three Problems
			i. The Long View Problem
			ii. The Donald Davidson Problem
			iii. The Concatenation Problem
		5. Lessons from the Three Problems
		6. When Does the Intervention-Centered Approach “Work”?
		7. Voodoo
		8. The Context-Centered Approach
		9. Conclusion
	6 From an Individual to a Holistic Lens: Reassessing Marketing Models to Deliver Impact
		6.1 Introduction
			6.1.1 Marketing Needs a New Theoretical Starting Point to Deliver Bigger Impact
		6.2 Status Quo: Today’s Marketing Landscape
			6.2.1 The Research Tools That Are Used to Gain Insight into Consumers’ Needs and Motivations Are Often Asking the Wrong Questio
			6.2.2 The Models That Are Built to Map Consumer Behavior Assume That the Human Experience Is Atomizable
			6.2.3 The Expectations for How Consumer Understanding Can Be Used to Guide Marketing Activities Are Self-limiting
		6.3 Moving Beyond the Cartesian Worldview
		6.4 Building Holistic Marketing Models
			6.4.1 The World
			6.4.2 The Aspects
			6.4.3 The Mood
			6.4.4 The Meaning
		6.5 Implications for the Practice of Marketing
			6.5.1 The Research Tools: Consumer Behavior Needs to Be Studied in Context
			6.5.2 The Role of Brands in an Age of “Co-ownership”: Marketers Need to Think about the World in Which Their Brands Belong, in
			6.5.3 The Role of Consumer Understanding in Business Strategy: Insights into the World of the Consumer Should Drive Decision-ma
		6.6 Case Study: Holistic Framework Applied to Running
	Commentary: Unity and Disunity in Consumer Behavior Research
		Attilia Ruzzene
		1. Ex uno plures
		2. Ex pluribus unum
		3. Plurality within Unity
	7 The Fish Tank Complex of Social Modeling
		7.1 A Change of Speed
		7.2 The Spatial Framing of Collective Modeling
		7.3 The Shortcomings of the Micro-Macro Divide
		7.4 Versions
		7.5 The Example of the Law Factory
		7.6 Everything Needs to Change, so Everything Can Stay the Same
	Commentary: Versioning and Structural Change
		1 The Micro-Macro Distinction
		2 Representations of What?
		3 The Difficulty of Modeling Structural Change
		4 Conclusion
	8 Social Statistics Using Strategic Structuralism and Pluralism
		8.1 Introduction
		8.1 Strategic Structuralism
			8.1.1 Inductive, Deductive, Retroductive, and Abductive
			8.1.2 A Little Background on Realism in Social Science
		8.2 Realist Statistics: Simple Examples
		8.3 Latent Variable Regression Models
		8.4 Criteria for Validity of Research Arguments
		8.5 Additional Use of Statistical Tests in Surprising Places
		8.6 Conclusions
		Acknowledgments
	Commentary: Heterogeneity, Plasticity, and Mechanisms: Comments on Olsen
		Heterogeneity and Plasticity
		Critical Realism
		Methodological Pluralism
		Conclusion
Part Three Explanation, Theorizing, Performativity
	9 Causal Mechanisms and Qualitative Causal Inference in the Social Sciences
		9.1 Introduction
		9.2 Process Tracing
		9.3 Causation as Intervention and the RCM
		9.4 Process Tracing with Invariant Causal Mechanisms
		9.5 Conclusion
	Commentary: An Alternative Hypothesis about Process Tracing: Comments on “Causal Mechanisms and Qualitative Causal Inference i
		1. Introduction
		2. Is Process Tracing a Method for Inferring Unit Causation?
		3. An Alternative Hypothesis
	10 How to Theorize? On the Changing Role and Meaning of Theory in the Social Sciences
		10.1 Introduction
		10.2 Classical Sociology
		10.3 First Phase of Postwar Sociology
		10.4 Second Phase of Postwar Sociology
		10.5 Contemporary Sociology
		10.6 Conclusion
	Commentary: Social Theory and Underdetermination: A Philosophical History and Reconstruction
		1 The Project of Behavioral Science
		2 The Next Stage
	11 Assembling Economic Actors: Time-varying Rates and the New Electricity Consumer
		11.1 Introduction
		11.2 Economics and Dynamic Pricing for Electricity
		11.3 Explaining the Emergent Price Regime
		11.4 AMI Rate Cases
		11.5 Price System as Political Accommodation
		11.6 Assembling the Consumer
		11.7 The Electricity Consumer as a Scientific Construction
		11.8 Conclusion
	Commentary: Assembling the Economic Actors
		1. Performativity: An Ontological Perspective
		2. From Ontology to Methodology
		3. Conclusion
Index