Stephen Turner

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• Ph.D.
• Professor (Full) at University of South Florida

Discussions of post-truth typically appeal to a notion of science as objective and therefore non-ideological. Objectivity has been attacked as itself an ideology, and a large literature has developed which claims that there are alternative “epistemologies” which reveal facts which this ideology excludes. The focus on the question what is a fact lea...

Dyskutowane są zmiany w nauce i ich znaczenie dla zrozumienia norm nauki oraz zwiększonego ulegania kontroli zewnętrznej, jakiej podlega transformacja nauki w obecnym reżimie ewaluacji, konkursów grantowych i komercjalizacji. Zadaje się także pytanie, czy rodzaj badań dotyczących fundamentalnych kwestii poruszanych w Podwójnej helisie został wypart...

L. J. Henderson was a central figure in Harvard discussions of the nature of science in the interwar period, and served as a bridge between the sciences and the social sciences. Two key ideas were promoted by Henderson: systems and conceptual schemes, both of which spread quickly at Harvard and then beyond. In this paper the focus will be on concep...

The Liberal Theory of Science, best articulated by Michael Polanyi, held that science advanced when autonomous scientists followed their best hunches and spontaneously coordinated their efforts as a result of their mutual dependence, in a setting devoted to scientific truth with a tradition supporting it, in a quest for a comprehensive understandin...

A set of events, long term trends, and internal conflicts has come to a head in the recent controversy over the Harvard President, the university's political role, and academic freedom. These raise questions about the traditional model of the vocation of scholarship and the role of the professor, and specifically about the continued relevance of th...

Recent developments in social epistemology have applied a radically expansive notion of harm which encompasses beliefs and kinds of scientific knowledge. The implied or explicit implication of these notions is that these harms need to be suppressed. The notion of disinformation has turned this into institutional practice. The Covid pandemic saw the...

In this reply to comments by Schliesser, Kochin, Kositna, Sassower, Miller, and Eyal and Sheremet, the underlying thesis of “Epistemic Coercion” is elaborated and explained. Epistemic Coercion is often thought to be impossible: no one can coerce belief. This is the thesis of epistemic voluntarism. But the techniques and responses the paper addresse...

The status and nature of the state have been the traditional source of claims about the reality of supra-individual social entities. Kelsen was the dissolver of this problematic, by asserting the identity of state and law, and asserting that law was the authorized actions of individuals. But this required an account of the origin of law itself. He...

Universal Logic is the study of the formal properties of logical systems in terms of the ways in which these formal features are found across systems of various kinds. A crucial example of this problematic is found at the heart of cognitive science. Brains are computers or computer-like things. But the digital logic of computers and the logic of co...

Sociologists and social thinkers have long been concerned with the problem of the role of knowledge in society. In the 1940s and 1950s the sociology of science concerned itself with the related problem of the authority of science and with conflicts between science and democracy. In a world of complexities understood only by experts, the conflict be...

This comment discusses the suggestions made in Mahoney’s “Constructivist Set-Theoretic Analysis: An Alternative to Essentialist Social Science” (2023). Mahoney presents an approach to cases of intersectionality or confounding which produce causal results unlike those that result from traditional net effects causal modeling. He presents it as an alt...

The key feature of a knowledge formation is that it finds a way to finance the production of knowledge. We are accustomed to thinking of universities as the standard knowledge formation of modern science, social science, and the humanities. But this was not true before the twentieth century and is decreasingly true in the twenty-first. The RAND Cor...

This comment discusses the suggestions made in Mahoney’s “Constructivist Set-Theoretic Analysis: An Alternative to Essentialist Social Science” (2023). Mahoney presents an approach to cases of intersectionality or confounding which produce causal results unlike those that result from traditional net effects casual modelling. He presents it as an al...

This chapter discusses the question of whether and how sociology makes progress, focusing on two examples, one more or less theoretical and multi method, the other involving conventional quantitative causal modeling. The first case, community power studies, began with interesting cases, and ended in theoretical plurality and abandonment. The releva...

This volume brings together investigations from social scientists, philosophers, and legal scholars into the political dimensions of expertise. It is motivated by the sense that growing mistrust in experts represents a danger to democratic politics today, insofar as science and experts are integral to the checks and balances on which liberal democr...

This volume brings together investigations from social scientists, philosophers, and legal scholars into the political dimensions of expertise. It is motivated by the sense that growing mistrust in experts represents a danger to democratic politics today, insofar as science and experts are integral to the checks and balances on which liberal democr...

A través de una serie de casos históricos y análisis cuantitativos, los trabajos presentados en este número de Estudios Sociológicos abordan cuestiones fundamentales sobre las consecuencias políticas del financiamiento extranjero de las ciencias sociales. En conjunto, estos trabajos ilustran la paradoja inherente a la financiación de la vida intele...

Vilfredo Pareto was given a major reputational boost by the efforts, at Harvard, of L. J. Henderson and the prominent figures he influenced. Carl J. Friedrich was close to this group, but during WWII wrote a scathing attack on his theory of elites and on Pareto generally. Although the attack was misleading, it reflected Friedrich’s own political co...

Carl Friedrich produced a list of characteristics of totalitarianism that for nearly a decade was influential as a “theory of totalitarianism” and a point of reference afterward. It was the product of Friedrich’s long and complex intellectual engagement with the theory of the modern state, beginning with his defense of the use of Article 48 in 1930...

This is a discussion of the phenomenon of "curation," i.e the attempt to manipulate digital experience to produce a new sense of normality.

In this article the nature of Bruno Latour’s relation to Carl Schmitt is discussed, considering the point by point revisions of Schmitt offered by Latour and his references to Schmitt. These turn out to be plentiful and illuminating. Yet the nature of Latour’s revision and its implications are obscure. The implications of his notion of cosmopolitic...

Edward Shils’ and Michael Young’s “The Meaning of the Coronation,” took up crucial aspects of Shils’ thinking about differentiating types of social bonds, which led to his distinction between primordial, civil, and sacred bonds, and to his focus on center and periphery and the charisma of central institutions. The relation of these concepts to colo...

This is a review of Gregor Fitzi's Normative Intermittency

https://books.emeraldinsight.com/page/detail/mad-hazard/?k=9781803826707

This is a commentary on William Lynch’s Minority Report, which is a synthesis of the last 75 years of STS writings with philosophical themes from Lakatos, Feyerabend, and others. The comment questions the continued relevance of older ideas of scientific opinion which rested on the supposed autonomy of scientists in the face of the present grant sys...

The phenomenon of sacrifice was a major problem in nineteenth century social thought about religion for a variety of reasons. These surfaced in a spectacular way in a German trial in which the most prominent Jewish philosopher of the century, the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen, was asked to be an expert witness. The text he produced on the nature of Jud...

Faculty of Philosophy at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań and Polish Philosophical Association, Poznań Division invite for an online discussion on the book of Giacomo Borbone, "The Relevance of Models. Idealization and Concretization in Leszek Nowak" (Műnchen: Grin Verlag 2021). The participants will be: Francesco Coniglione (Catania University,...

Martin Bulmer made distinguished and groundbreaking contributions to the history of sociology, particularly in his classic study of the Chicago School, which spanned the era of personal memory and archival history. His work particularly emphasized empirical research, which led him to problems relating to the Laura Spelman Rockefeller fund and its l...

Angenommen, zu Kants Lebzeiten hätte jemand die prophetische Frage aufgeworfen, welche theologischen und moralischen Konzepte die kommenden zwei Jahrhunderte im öffentlichen Diskurs überdauern würden.

This is a history of the concept of post tradition from the interwar period to the postwar period, concentrating on Bellah, MacIntyre and Giddens.

This is a review essay on Charles Camic's book on Veblen, which is critical of its circularity and failure to address the bulk of Veblen's work, which was published after he left Stanford. The polemical point of the book was that Veblen was an academic insider schooled by the finest and best connected economists and never left the fold. Only by ign...

The classics of social theory have a peculiar status: our current list is the product of past academic strategizing, and the list of favored classics has changed. Currently there is a process of replacing them with older writers who better fit current concerns, and to cancel those who hold the wrong views, or are of the oppressor class, in order to...

This paper traces the development of anti-populism in American political thought, with an emphasis on the writings of Woodrow Wilson and the reactions to them. These defended the idea fo a European-style professional administration with discretionary power in place of elected officials, and dismissed the issue of democratic accountability. The reas...

This is a commentary in a symposium on Gabor Biro's book on Polanyi's economics in the thirties, which discusses the social theory aspects of his thought, his Third Way thinking, and its evolution.

This is a brief response to comments by Struan Jacobs and Peter Blum on The Calling of Social Thought, Rediscovering the Work of Edward Shils, a recent collection of essays edited by Christopher Adair-Toteff and Stephen Turner. It identifies a distinctive contribution of Shils to the larger problem of the tacit.

Rates of crime for Blacks in the United States in the post-slavery era have always been high relative to Whites. But explaining, or minimizing, this fact faces a major problem: individual excuses for bad acts point to deficiencies, in the agent, which are perhaps forgivable, such as mental deficiency or a deprived childhood, but at the price of tre...

This book evaluates the potential of the pragmatist notion of habit possesses to influence current debates at the crossroads between philosophy, cognitive sciences, neurosciences, and social theory. It deals with the different aspects of the pragmatic turn involved in 4E cognitive science and traces back the roots of such a pragmatic turn to both c...

Freud was a major cultural and intellectual influence in the twentieth century, whose significance waned. Kaye’s exposition argues that part of the reason is that his presentation of himself as a medical scientist obscured his true interest in society and thus the social theory that informed his commentary on culture. In support of this argument he...

Discusses changes in science and their relevance for understanding the norms of science and the rise of compliance and external control, as science has, under the current regimes of evaluation and grant competition, as well as commercialization, transformed. It also asks whether the kind of inquiry into fundamental questions celebrated in The Doubl...

This paper addresses the question of what "democratic values" are, and concludes that apart from the democratic norm of submission to the majority, the additional central and perhaps only value is accountability.

Conventional accounts of liberal democracy tend to obscure a basic fact: the phenomenon of administration. The American reception of the administrative state was self-consciously imitative of Continental models of state bureaucracy, as a remedy for the ills of democratic politics, but construed as a means of saving democracy from itself, and from l...

Characterizing science as a public good, as Steve Fuller notes, is a part of an ideological construal of science, linked to a particular portrayal of science in the postwar era that was designed to provide a rationale for the funding of pure or basic science. The image of science depended on the idea of scientists as autonomous truth-seekers. But t...

This is an overview of 19th cognitive science thinking by social theorists and neo-Kantians, and explains how the standard social science model emerged and eclipsed the promising start made by Spencer.

Tradução de “From Education to Expertise: Sociology as a ‘Profession’” de William Buxton e Stephen Turner. O artigo foi publicado originalmente em Terence Halliday e Morris Janowitz (eds.). Sociology and its Publics. The Forms and Fates of Disciplinary Organizations. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. p. 373-407, 1992. Traduzido por Juan Pedro B...

Christopher Dawson identified with sociology, wrote extensively for the original Sociological Review, was a stalwart of the Sociological Society in the interwar years, achieved international recognition as a sociologist, engaged with Karl Mannheim and the Moot, and in the postwar period defended meta-history and the sociologically oriented historic...

This book explores cognitive sociology as an area of inquiry focused on culture, cognition, and the social dimensions of human thought. Highlighting differing traditions, from cultural sociological perspectives focused on emphasizing group differences in categorical knowledge to neuropsychology-influenced integrative perspectives analyzing the mech...

This book explores cognitive sociology as an area of inquiry focused on culture, cognition, and the social dimensions of human thought. Highlighting differing traditions, from cultural sociological perspectives focused on emphasizing group differences in categorical knowledge to neuropsychology-influenced integrative perspectives analyzing the mech...

“Science as a Vocation” describes an ideal of scholarship for a vanished world. Images of the past university still color our idea of the university. Weber dispelled illusions about the university of his own time, and pointed to its cruelty and irrationality. Veblen did something similar for the American university of his time, defended a similar i...