Suchergebnisse

Similarities & differences between social scientific & literary uses of irony are examined, & the role of irony in formulating hypotheses about human relations is considered. Applications of irony to the study of technological innovation are explored. It is suggested that the long-standing interest of social scientists in the ironies associated with technology articulates closely with the aims & needs of currently prominent policy-oriented fields such as technology assessment & social impact analysis. HA.

Le Dictionnaire de la Chine contemporaine veut comprendre la Chine contemporaine sous les angles des relations internationales, de l'histoire récente, du politique, du droit, de l'économie, de la géographie, de la sociologie, de l'anthropologie, des sciences et des techniques, de la culture. Les notions donnant lieu à un article répondent aux catégories attendues par les sciences sociales, mais elles tiennent compte aussi des spécificités chinoises. Une liste de renvois à la fin de chaque article permet de prolonger l'analyse de la notion en question, et un index en fin d'ouvrage donne la liste complète des articles mais aussi des principaux termes chinois traités en leur sein.

The gradual emergence of the idea of culture is traced from the writings of Comte to those of Durkheim, Weber and Parsons, from whom Almond and Verba derived the concept of political culture. The idea of culture emerged as a response to a problem raised by Comte around 1830: how the social sciences, when developed, would differ from the other positive sciences, yet remain a branch of a unitary `positive philosophy'. It is suggested that the idea of culture is an appropriate solution to Comte's problem, a solution preferable to its chief historic rival, utility (rational choice) theory.

This article reviews the state of the discipline of international relations. It starts from statements made by the editors in their editorial published in the first issue of this journal. The editors noted that there seemed to have been less adherence to positivism in international relations than in other areas of political science and that there was both more opposition to positivism and more methodological and epistemological openness in international relations than in political science generally. The article outlines the current state of the field, focusing on the rationalist mainstream and then on the reflectivist alternatives, before looking at social constructivism, seeing it as the likely acceptable alternative to rationalism in the mainstream literature of the next decade. It then turns to examine whether international relations is still an American social science, before looking at the situation in the United Kingdom. It concludes that the editors' comments were indeed accurate, but that the fact that there is both more opposition to positivism in international relations and more openness in the UK academic community does not mean that the mainstream US literature is anything like as open or pluralist. The UK community is indeed more able to develop theory relevant to the globalised world at the new millennium, but the US academic community still dominates the discipline.

Introduction / C. Mantzavinos -- Part I : basic problems of sociality -- Language and social ontology / John R. Searle -- Comment : de rerum natura : dragons of obliviousness and the science of social ontology / Mark Turner -- Shared agency / Michael E. Bratman -- Comment : where is the social? / Pierre Demeulenaere -- The reality of group agents / Philip Pettit -- Comment : a note on group agents / Diego Rios -- Part II : laws and explanation in the social sciences -- Pysicalism and the human sciences / David Papineau -- Comment : reductionism in the human sciences : a philosopher's game / Robert Shulman and Ian Shapiro -- Complexity and explanation in the social sciences / Sandra Mitchell -- Comment : conditional knowledge : an oxymoron? / James Alt -- The heterogeneous social : new thinking about the foundations of the social sciences / Daniel Little -- Comment : causal mechanisms and generalizations / Jack Knight -- What is this thing called "efficacy"? / Nancy Cartwright -- Comment : randomized controlled trials and public policy / Gerd Gigerenzer -- Part III : how philosophy and the social sciences can enrich each other : three examples -- Why do people cooperate as much as they do? / James Woodward -- Comment : putting the problem of social order into perspective / Werner Güth and Hartmut Kliemt -- Situations against virtues : the situationist attack on virtue theory / Ernest Sosa -- Comment : do people have character traits? / Steven Lukes -- What kind of problem is the hermeneutic circle? / C. Mantzavinos -- Comment : going in circles / David-Hillel Ruben -- Epilogue / C. Mantzavinos.

This report was commissioned by the European Science Foundation (ESF) in the framework of the Member Organisation Fora instrument (Member Organisations in Central and Eastern Europe) from the Aleksanteri Institute, the Centre for Russian and Eastern European Studies. The aim of the study was to identify and analyse the situation and challenges in research in Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEs), particularly concerning research conducted in Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) and in the field of social sciences. The main emphasis of the report is on state-run universities. The countries under examination are Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. All these countries are members of the ESF with the exception of Latvia, which was included in the study because it was seen as an integral part of the area under investigation. The respective countries are new members of the European Union (EU). The information on each country is presented in one of the main sections in this report.