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External validity is typically regarded as the downside of case study research by methodologists and social scientists; case studies, however, are often aimed at drawing lessons that are generalizable to new contexts. The gap between the generalizability potential of case studies and the research goals demands closer scrutiny. I suggest that the conclusion that case study research is weak in external validity follows from a set of assumptions that I term the "traditional view," which are disputable at best. In this view, external validity is treated as a matter of mere representativeness. I argue that it is best understood instead as a problem of inference and that the emphasis should be placed on the comparability of the study rather than on the typicality of the case. By making case studies highly comparable, their external validity can be reliably and efficiently assessed and, in this way, their generalizability potential enhanced.

According to many philosophers and scientists, human sociality is explained by our unique capacity to "share" attitudes with others. The conditions under which mental states are shared have been widely debated in the past two decades, focusing especially on the issue of their reducibility to individual intentionality and the place of collective intentions in the natural realm. It is not clear, however, to what extent these two issues are related and what methodologies of investigation are appropriate in each case. In this article, I propose a solution that distinguishes between epistemic and ontological interpretations of the demand for the conditions of reduction of collective intentionality. While the philosophical debate has contributed important insights into the former, recent advances in the cognitive sciences offer novel resources to tackle the latter. Drawing on Michael Tomasello's research in the ontogeny of shared intentionality in early instances of interaction based on joint attention, I propose an empirically informed argument of what it would take to address the ontological question of irreducibility, thus making a step forward in the naturalization of collective intentionality.

John Searle claims that social-scientific laws are impossible because social phenomena are physically open-ended. William Butchard and Robert D'Amico have recently argued that, by Searle's own lights, money is a social phenomena that is physically closed. However, Butchard and D'Amico rely on a limited set of data in order to draw this conclusion, and fail to appreciate the implications of Searle's theory of social ontology with regard to the physical open-endedness of money. Money is not physically open-ended in the strong sense that Butchard and D'Amico require, and their argument for the possibility of social-scientific laws fails as a result.

Evolutionary psychology and human sociobiology often reject the mere possibility of symbolic causality. Conversely, theories in which symbolic causality plays a central role tend to be both anti-nativist and anti-evolutionary. This article sketches how these apparent scientific rivals can be reconciled in the study of disgust. First, we argue that there are no good philosophical or evolutionary reasons to assume that symbolic causality is impossible. Then, we examine to what extent symbolic causality can be part of the theoretical toolbox of the evolutionary social sciences. This examination leads to the conclusion that it is possible to make evolutionary sense of Mary Douglas's theory of disgust, and that her view of symbolic causality can and should inform evolutionary theories of (sociocultural) disgust.

Institutions are normative social structures that are collectively accepted. In his book Making the Social World, John R. Searle maintains that these social structures are created and maintained by Status Function Declarations. The article's author criticizes this claim and argues, first, that Searle overestimates the role that language plays in relation to institutions and, second, that Searle's notion of a Status Function Declaration confuses more than it enlightens. The distinction is exposed between regulative and constitutive rules as being primarily a linguistic one: whereas deontic powers figure explicitly in regulative rules, they feature only implicitly in constitutive rules. Furthermore, he contends that Searle's collective acceptance account of human rights cannot adequately account for the fact that people have these rights even when they are not recognized. Finally, It is argued that a conception of collective intentionality that involves collective commitment is needed in order to do justice to the normative dimension of institutions.

Epistemologies and research methods are not free of metaphysics. This is to say that they are both, supported by (or presumed by), and support (or presume) fundamental ontologies. A discussion of the epistemological foundations of "multimethod" research in the social sciences—in as much as such research claims to unearth "causal" relations—therefore cannot avoid the ontological presuppositions or implications of such a discussion. But though there isn't necessarily a perfect correspondence between ontology, epistemology, and methodology, they do constrain each other. As such it is possible to make methodological choices that are at odds with one's (implicit) ontology or argue from an ontology that is inconsistent one's choice of methods. Yet lack of recognition of this fact has hampered methodological discussions in political science, especially with respect to the discussion on the merits of multimethod research. The ontology implicitly accepted in such discussions is "reductionist" and "regularist," that is, one that respectively defines causes in terms of noncausal relations and states of affair and affirms that such noncausal relations are regularities in nature. This article will argue that any attempt to fit "multimethod" research (where "multimethod" signifies some combination of inferential statistics and case studies) within this narrow ontology is destined to fail since such a metaphysics logically cannot accord case studies a necessary or sufficient role in the in the establishment of causal relations. However, there are metaphysical positions within the ambit of an empiricist philosophy of science that can accommodate multiple methods without contradiction. The article discusses two such ontologies and suggests ways in which they might allow the establishment of a coherent epistemological foundation for multimethod research, however, within a decidedly empiricist philosophy of science.

The Rawls–Habermas debate is having a revival. In this article I argue that both philosophers develop different freestanding conceptions of political legitimacy, and show how they diverge when it comes to how political legitimacy can be justified. Habermas is looking for a deeper justification than Rawls will allow for. I then proceed to show how the different meta-ethical positions yield two different versions of democratic theory, focusing in particular on rights and popular sovereignty. I demonstrate how both conceive of the co-originality of private and public autonomy, and subsequently take issue with Habermas' reading of Rawls. I argue that Rawls should not be understood as a natural rights theorist, that Habermas misunderstands the role of the original position, and that Rawls cannot be considered a strong constitutionalist. Thus, the real difference between Rawls and Habermas revolves around their different conceptions of political legitimacy.

In grappling with the micro-macro problem in sociology, philosophers of the field are finding it increasingly useful to associate micro-sociology with theory reduction. In this article I argue that the association is ungrounded and undesirable. Although of a reductive "disposition," micro-sociological theories instantiate something more like "reductive explanation," whereby the causal roles of social wholes are explained in terms of their psychological parts. In this form, micro-sociological theories may actually have a better shot at closing the sociology–psychology explanatory gap, and resist many antireductionist arguments, including the well-known argument from "multiple realization."

Weber's notion of ideal-types has most frequently been rejected as incoherent or overly abstract. This article maintains that it insightfully addresses explanatory issues in social science by encompassing the agents' subjective understanding and the need for theorists to comprehend, explain, and evaluate it. As such, ideal-types are not versions of established models in natural science or economics. Further keys are seeing ideal-types as blending interpretive understanding and causal explanation but not thereby causal generalizations, and rational appraisals as consistent with value pluralism.

The Oxford Handbook provides an extensive and innovative review of developments in Analytical Sociology (AS) which is a theory program which seeks to develop 'thin explanations' of social phenomena by understanding their micro-foundations through explicitly developed models and then tracing through the broader consequences of these actions and interactions for aggregate social patterns. The volume covers the key characteristics of this approach in terms of ontology and epistemology and then assays recent developments across over two dozen areas of application: each a particular social mechanism. Methodological approaches particularly pertinent to AS are also covered. However, some of the criticisms of the AS programme are also noted, especially its lack of attention thus far to meso-level and macro-level mechanisms.

Quine's philosophy comprises a bewildering set of views whose integrating principle is his "confirmed extensionalism". The paper offers a historical as well as an intellectual reconstruction of extensionalism. Traditional extensionalism (Boole) freed logic from Aristotelian essentialism that had inhibited the development of logic. Quine's confirmed extensionalism is the acceptance, as a matter of course, of the validity of Frege's criticism of [Boole's] extensionalism. His confirmed extensionalism is a generalized version of the philosophy of science known as conventionalism. As such, it places the advancement of science outside the province of science proper. It is, thus, at odds with Quine's repeated expressions of alliance with the Popperian (hypothetico-deductive) model of science.

The philosophy of Ernest Gellner was much influenced by his studies in the social sciences. The philosophical problems he examined and the solutions he proposed originated there. To what extent does the legacy of Gellner influence the social sciences and current events and social transformations? More than a few of the essays in Ernest Gellner and Contemporary Social Thought find that while the questions he raised are fruitful, the answers he gave them do not pass the test of time. By contradiction, John Hall, in Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography, finds that Gellner laid the grounds for understanding the origins and development of current events and social transformations. Gellner's distinguished three spheres in modernity which eventually created a mosaic of nations in Europe - agraria, industria and nationalism. Most of Gellner's critics found the creation a threat to enchantment; Hall found it disenchanting and cold yet an illuminating way to reach solutions to our contemporary problems. Assessing Gellner in the current context namely, global fluctuations and through the spectacles of these two books, I find that Gellner's spheres in modernity are called to overlap exerting pressure on the mosaic of nations and, to a large extent, transforming it into an imagined seamless community of people in which our human rationality accommodates only a touch of reenchantment. I suppose that Gellner would agree.

This article aims to contribute to a critical ontology of social objects. Recent works on collective intentionality and norm-following neglect the question how free agents can be brought to collectively intend to x, although x is not in their own interest. By arguing for a natural disposition to empathic understanding and drawing on recent research in the neurosciences, this article outlines an ontological framework that extends collective intentionality to questions of oppression and status asymmetries. In a contribution to this journal, Wisnewski (2005) unfortunately mischaracterizes the problem of meaning in social criticism. Implementing status problems in studies of collective intentions and construing social facts as both subjective and objective in character helps explain why agents can have persistent "misunderstandings" of social objects.