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In his presidential address to the American Statistical Association in 1931, William Fielding Ogburn, an American sociologist important particularly in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, took as his theme the difference between statistics and art. His argument, articulated here and in a wide range of writings throughout his career, was that "statistics has been developed to give an exact picture of reality, while the picture that the artist draws is a distortion of reality" (Ogburn 1932: 1). He then went on to express his belief that emotion leads to distortion in our observations. "It is this distorting influence of emotion and wishes," he said, "that is more responsible for bad thinking than any lack of logic" (ibid.: 4). But statistics, he believed, could ameliorate the distorting effects of emotion on our empirical observations. There was a problem, however, because "the artist in us wants understanding rather than statistics. But understanding is hardly knowledge. . . . The tests of knowledge are reliability and accuracy, not understanding" (ibid.: 5).

"Mahoney's starting point is the problem of essentialism in social science. Essentialism--the belief that the members of a category possess hidden properties ("essences") that make them members of the category and that endow them with a certain nature--is appropriate for scientific categories ("atoms", for instance) but not for human ones ("revolutions," for instance). Despite this, much social science research takes place from within an essentialist orientation; those who reject this assumption goes so far in the other direction as to reject the idea of an external reality, independent of human beings, altogether

Abstract
This publication meets a long-felt need to show the relevance of cybernetics for the social sciences (including psychology, sociology, and anthropology). User-friendly descriptions of the core concepts of cybernetics are provided, with examples of how they can be used in the social sciences. It is explained how cybernetics functions as a transdiscipline that unifies other disciplines and a metadiscipline that provides insights about how other disciplines function. An account of how cybernetics emerged as a distinct field is provided, following interdisciplinary meetings in the 1940s, convened to explore feedback and circular causality in biological and social systems. How encountering cybernetics transformed the author's thinking and his understanding of life in general, is also recounted.

Published with the support of the Academy for Social Sciences, this volume provides an illuminating look at topics of concern to everyone at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Leading social scientists tackle complex questions such as immigration, unemployment, climate change, war, banks in trouble, and an ageing population.

"Philosophers, lawyers, political, and social theorists debate normative concepts such as democracy, justice, human rights. Concepts are fundamental to description. Hence for anthropology, ethnography, grounded theory and similar methodologies developing concepts is a core theoretical and empirical activity. Concepts are thus core in causal theories, normative philosophy and empirical description. This book provides a unified framework for working with, constructing, and evaluating concepts that applies in these different domains."--

AbstractCybernetics was formulated by its founders as a metadiscipline with the aim not only of fostering collaboration between disciplines (interdisciplinarity), but also of sharing knowledge across disciplines (transdisciplinarity). In this paper the relationship between cybernetics and the social sciences is reviewed. The distinction between first and second (in general, higher) order forms of cybernetics is introduced to characterize three approaches to the study of social systems. The three approaches are described as ideal types; it is acknowledged that in practice investigators may draw on more than one of the approaches and that there are contexts in which the distinctions between them become fuzzy. The three approaches are:


studies of social systems and social behaviour that adopt classical scientific modes of investigation;


studies that investigate the interactions of social actors;


approaches that attempt to characterise social systems as distinct forms of autonomous whole.


Pask's conversation theory, with its concept of the 'psychological individual', is introduced as a theory that is explicitly designed to build a bridge between the second and third approaches. Copyright © 2001 International Society for the Systems Sciences.