Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Philosophical Theory and Scientific Practice

Introduction C. Mantzavinos Part I. Basic Problems of Sociality: 1. Language and social ontology John R. Searle Comment: De Rerum Natura: dragons of obliviousness and the science of social ontology Mark Turner 2. Shared agency Michael E. Bratman Comment: Where is the social? Pierre Demeulenaere 3. The reality of group agents Philip Pettit Comment: A note on group agents Diego Rios Part II. Laws and Explanation in the Social Sciences: 4. Physicalism and the human sciences David Papineau Comment: Reductionism in the human sciences: a philosopher's game Robert G. Shulman and Ian Shapiro 5. Complexity and explanation in the social sciences Sandra Mitchell Comment: Conditional knowledge: an oxymoron? James Alt 6. The heterogeneous social: new thinking about the foundations of the social sciences Daniel Little Comment: Causal mechanisms and generalizations Jack Knight 7. 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: 8. Why do people cooperate as much as they do? James Woodward Comment: Putting the problem of social order into perspective Werner Guth and Hartmut Kliemt 9. Situations against virtues: the situationist attack on virtue theory Ernest Sosa Comment: Do people have character-traits? Steven Lukes 10. What kind of problem is the hermeneutic circle? C. Mantzavinos Comment: Going in circles David-Hillel Ruben Epilogue C. Mantzavinos.