Stephen Turner

University of South Florida | USF · Department of Philosophy

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 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...

“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...

Verstehen, understanding another human being through some form of empathy, is a natural process with the involvement, probably in a complex way, of the brain. There is a temptation to describe Verstehen in a way that mystifies it, or to collapse it into more general considerations about mind reading. The social science tradition, however, points in...

Edward Shils was an important figure in twentieth century social theory, and a true transatlantic thinker who divided his time between the University of Chicago and the U.K. He was friends with many important thinkers in other fields, such as Michael Polanyi and Saul Bellow. He became known to sociologists through his brief collaboration with Talco...

One of Ian C. Jarvie’s most interesting contributions is his discussion of the thinking of Karl Popper and Michael Polanyi on the nature and workings of the scientific community and their relation to politics (Philosophy of Science 68(4): 545–564, 2001). The self-image these thinkers contributed to still lingers, but their accounts capture a histor...

In the symposium devoted to the Prague Spring of 1968, 14 sociologists and political scientists recall how they experienced the Prague Spring and reflect on the significance of the Czechoslovak reform movement for the present day. The symposium includes contributions from Johann P. Arnason (Iceland/Czech Republic), Richard Flacks (USA), John A. Hal...

The rise of cognitive neuroscience is the most important scientific and intellectual development of the last thirty years. Findings pour forth, and major initiatives for brain research continue. The social sciences have responded to this development slowly-for good reasons. The implications of particular controversial findings, such as the discover...

The belief-desire model of action explanation is deeply ingrained in multiple disciplines. There is reason to think that it is a cultural artifact. But is there an alternative? In this discussion, I will consider the radical critique of this action explanation model by Rüdiger Bittner, which argues that the model appeals to dubious mental entities,...