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Discusses the historical & current relationship between the social sciences, the scientific method, & postmodern theory. Drawing on the methodology & conclusions of Galileo, modern science has attempted to reduce the distance between science & reality through objective methodology & heightened rationality. It is argued here that the scientific method relies more on the choice of appropriate language & vocabulary than on actual correspondence between methodology & fact. Social scientists have traditionally adopted this skewed approach to life through the scientific method, which blurs rather than reveals reality. The boundaries between explanation & understanding, or nature & humanity, have little meaning in the real world, & it is suggested that the social sciences must be seen as continuous with literature, history, anthropology, politics, etc. Both Thomas Dewey & Michel Foucault advocate rejection of traditional notions of rationality, objectivity, method, & truth. However, it is concluded that Dewey's vocabulary allows more room for hope & solidarity within the social sciences. T. Sevier

Der Charakter der japanischen Sozialwissenschaften war aus historischer Sicht immer schon international, indem ein Austausch bzw. Import von Wissen und Gelehrten aus westlichen Ländern seit ihrer frühesten Entwicklung im 19. Jahrhundert erfolgte. Heute ist es ihr Ziel, welches von den Regierungsorganisationen vorgegeben wird, das vorhandene Wissen in andere Teile der Welt zu exportieren. In diesem Sinne waren die Aktivitäten der Sozialwissenschaften in Japan seit etwa eineinhalb Jahrhunderten durch den Import / Export von Fachwissen geprägt. Dabei hat immer die Regierungspolitik die Initiative ergriffen, um den internationalen Status der japanischen Sozialwissenschaften zu wahren. In diesem Kontext ist danach zu fragen, was einzelne Gelehrte dazu beigetragen haben, die Internationalisierungsbestrebungen der Regierung zu unterstützen. Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden daher abseits der politischen Aspekte die Faktoren untersucht, welche zur Internationalisierung der Sozialwissenschaften in Japan geführt haben. Hierzu wird erstens der deutsche Einfluss auf die japanischen Sozialwissenschaften im späten 19. Jahrhundert sowie der Einfluss des Marxismus untersucht. Zweitens werden die Entwicklung des Hochschulsystems in Japan zwischen Forschung und Arbeitsmarkt sowie die Formen der interkulturellen Kommunikation in den Blick genommen. (ICI).

In the social sciences, teaching methods, approaches and tools have advanced over the past decades. This progress, however, has mostly taken place on a theoretical level. Very few of the ideas and findings were implemented in class. A typical class in the social sciences remains in a lecture format with hardly any technology besides slides. There are several reasons why courses like Political Science, International Relations and others have not implemented more of the methodological and technological progress that has taken place in the 20th and 21st century so far. While the COVID19 pandemic that started in 2020 has caused a major step forward towards acceptance of technologies in the social sciences there are more tools and devices that will bring further experiences to the discipline in the near future. One of the technologies that is entering higher education now is Virtual Reality (VR). This chapter will explore VR as a technology, discuss its application in higher education and analyse its contemporary and future role in the social sciences.

"SozioNet forms part of a forthcoming national social science information portal, which is currently being developed by the German Infoconnex initiative. Inspired by successful examples like MathNet or SOSIG, SozioNet provides access to freely available web resources with relevance to social science. It is based on a network of social science institutions and scientists, to agree on and establish common metadata standards. SozioNet implements a general infrastructure for the creation of semantically rich metadata, and for the harvesting and retrieval of relevant resources with a domain specific focus." (author's abstract)

This chapter places Oakeshott's criticism of the demarcation in the current debate on the separation of social sciences from the natural sciences & history. Nineteenth century thinking on the epistemological status of historical inquiry resulted in a hermeneutic tradition that purports to generate knowledge detached from values, interests & practical concerns that compose that experience. The deeply rooted error in the hermeneutic tradition is the failure to question the premises of the sciences it seeks to theorize. In "On Human Conduct," Oakeshott identifies the ambiguity of social science attempts at explaining intelligent conduct as the outcome of non-intelligent processes. Human conduct cannot be explained in general categories or social circumstances, or through the pretense of statistical generalizations, but must be understood through open-ended interpretations such as the controlled use of metaphor, exploration of the contextuality of meaning of action, & the evanescent & emergent quality of the relationship to other actions, or a historical explanation proper. 15 References. J. Harwell

Argues that the sociology of law should continue its long-standing focus on law & governmentality, but also should expand its analysis to an examination of the interaction of legal & nonlegal forms of governance. The beginning of such an enterprise is provided by the work of Michel Foucault (1977), raising the question of law's role in modern forms of governmental rationality. It is suggested that Foucault's analysis ought to be revised to attend to the plurality of forms of law & governance, & to focus more explicitly on forms of state power. Using this conception, it is contended that the key link between law & modern power is that law plays the organizational & ideological role of providing temporary moments of unification within dispersed fields of social power. This approach to law & governance is favored over others because it facilitates an account that remains sensitive to variations in modes of governance & local power while remaining attentive to the role of the state in the condensation of power relations. 69 References. D. M. Smith

The increasing role of social science in environmental policy & knowledge generation has resulted in an environmental discourse that is epistemologically realist, postivistic, disembedded, technological, & cognitivist. Such a discourse tends to mask important cultural, social, & existential dimensions of environmental crises & has become part of the modern environmental problem rather contributing to its solution. A constructivist, hermeneutic, poetic, & situated approach to environmental phenomena is needed. Examples of such accounts in three broad domains are highlighted: (1) environment, knowledge, & indeterminancy; (2) subjectivity & individuation; & (3) problems with current ways of incorporation of environmental considerations within political institutions. Ulrich Beck's contributions to illuminating the modern environmental problematic are discussed. 10 References. D. Generoli

Research in Social Science is usually based on survey data where individual research questions relate to observable concepts (variables). However, due to a lack of standards for data citations a reliable identification of the variables used is often difficult. In this paper, we present a work-in-progress study that seeks to provide a solution to the variable detection task based on supervised machine learning algorithms, using a linguistic analysis pipeline to extract a rich feature set, including terminological concepts and similarity metric scores. Further, we present preliminary results on a small dataset that has been specifically designed for this task, yielding modest improvements over the baseline.

Der Aufsatz behandelt die Leistungsfähigkeit der vorhandenen Software-Pakete, die für die Sozialwissenschaften angeboten werden. Die Datenformate erfassen nur zwei von einem Dutzend möglichen und notwendigen Formaten für die Sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung. Dieses mangelhafte Angebot behindert die Entwicklung der Sozialforschung. In einer Einzelkritik werden die Forschungen im Rahmen des "database management systems" (DBMS) und die Arbeit des CODASYL Programming Language Committee kritisiert. (BG)