Omnivore - What the Social Sciences Have to Tell Us

From Bookforum's Omnivore blog, this collection of links deals with the social sciences - everything from book reviews, the new journals, to poststructuralism and sociolinguistics.

What the social sciences have to tell us

Feb 12 2014  

3:00PM

• The inaugural issue of Hydra: Interdisciplinary Journal of Social Studies is out. Herbert Gintis (SFI) and Dirk Helbing (ETH Zurich): Homo Socialis: An Analytical Core for Sociological Theory. 
• Phillip M. Carter (FIU): Poststructuralist Theory and Sociolinguistics: Mapping the Linguistic Turn in Theory. 
• Bernd Reiter (USF): The Epistemology and Methodology of Exploratory Social Science Research: Crossing Popper with Marcuse. 
• From Society, a symposium on Facts, Values, and Social Science. 
• From Edge, what’s new in social science? A special event on the state of the art of what the social sciences have to tell us about human nature, HeadCon '13. 
• Davide Vecchi reviews Arguing About Human Nature: Contemporary Debates, ed. Stephen M. Downes and Edouard Machery. 
• John-Paul Smiley on the sociological imagination today: The need for biology. 
• The Third Intellectual Project: Iddo Tavory on the social condition. 
• David Banks on a social critique without social science. 
• An excerpt from The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature by Jamie Cohen-Cole. 
• Beyond Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft: David Fields on the foundations for ethical political humanist social science. 
• David Beer on an invitation to punk sociology. 
• Oz Flanagan on the physicist and the social scientist. 
• In economics, climate science and public health, computer models help us decide how to act — but can we trust them? 
• Ben Williamson on the death of the theorist and the emergence of data and algorithms in digital social research. 
• You can download The Post-Modern Significance of Max Weber's Legacy by Basit Bilal Koshul (2005).

Rom Harré on the Linguistic Turn in Philosophy (Philosophy Bites)

Rom Harré is a seminal figure in the field of discursive-cultural psychology. His work focuses on the actual symbolic systems and assignments of meanings that people use in managing their lives. His current research interests include the philosophy of science, language and thought, and the philosophy of psychology.

Among his many books are The Singular Self: An Introduction to the Psychology of Personhood (1998/2000), The Self and Others: Positioning Individuals and Groups in Personal, Political, and Cultural Contexts (2003, co-editor), Discursive Psychology in Practice (Research and Practice) (1995, co-editor), and many, many others (most of them are linked also over at the Philosophy Bites page).

Rom Harré on the Linguistic Turn in Philosophy

November 10, 2013

In the early part of the Twentieth Century Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein transformed philosophy: they emphasized the logical form of language. Ludwig Wittgenstein later repudiated his earlier philosophy, concentrating on how people actually use language, the things they do with words. Together with J.L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle and others, he initiated what has come to be known as the Linguistic Turn in philosophy. For this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast, Rom Harré, whose PhD supervisor was Austin, discusses the Linguistic Turn with Nigel Warburton.

Listen to Rom Harré on the Linguistic Turn in Philosophy

Listen to an earlier Social Science Bites podcast interview with Rom Harré on the Nature of Social Science