Socialism

By Oneill, John

While socialist ideas may retrospectively be identified in many earlier forms of protest and rebellion against economic injustice and political oppression, socialism both as a relatively coherent theoretical ...

Socialism

While socialist ideas may retrospectively be identified in many earlier forms of protest and rebellion against economic injustice and political oppression, socialism both as a relatively coherent theoretical ...

Social laws

By Pettit, Philip

Social science has always aspired to be like natural science (Hawthorn 1976). And since natural science claims to discover laws of nature, social science has always claimed to ...

Social action

By Tuomela, Raimo

Most of our actions take place in a social context and are, accordingly, in one way or another, dependent on the existence of other persons and their relevant ...

Social choice

By Hamlin, Alan

Social choice theory is the branch of economics concerned with the relationships between individual values, preferences and rights and collective decision making and evaluation. Social choice theory therefore ...

Social norms

By Gilbert, Margaret

A social norm may be defined as the rule of a particular social group. That men are to open doors for women, for instance, may be the rule ...

Social sciences, philosophy of

By Ruben, David-Hillel

Although some of the topics and issues treated in the philosophy of social science are as old as philosophy itself (for example, the contrast between nature and convention ...

Epistemology, social

see Social epistemology.

Social constructivism

see Constructivism.

Social contract

see Contractarianism.

Social nature of language

see Language, social nature of.

Experiments in social science

By Hughes, John A.

Within social science the experiment has an ambiguous place. With the possible exception of social psychology, there are few examples of strictly experimental studies. The classic study still ...

Feminism and social science

By Wylie, Alison

Feminists have two sorts of interest in the social sciences. With the advent of the second-wave women’s movement, they developed wide-ranging critiques of gender bias in the conceptual ...

Language, social nature of

By Smith, Barry C.

Language is mostly used in a social setting. We use it to communicate with others. We depend on others when learning language, and we constantly borrow one another’s ...

Naturalism in social science

By Benton, Ted

Naturalism is a term used in several ways. The more specific meanings of ‘naturalism’ in the philosophy of social sciences rest on the great popular authority acquired by ...

Social democracy

By Miller, David

The idea of social democracy is now used to describe a society the economy of which is predominantly capitalist, but where the state acts to regulate the economy ...

Social epistemology

By Schmitt, Frederick F.

Social epistemology is the conceptual and normative study of the relevance to knowledge of social relations, interests and institutions. It is thus to be distinguished from the sociology ...

Social epistemology

Social epistemology encompasses the study of the social dimensions of knowledge acquisition and transmission (Palermos and Pritchard 2013), the evaluation of beliefs and belief-forming mechanisms in their social ...

Social metaphysics

By Mason, Rebecca

Social metaphysics concerns the existence and nature of social entities. Social metaphysicians have focused primarily on the existence and nature of three ontological categories: social facts (e.g. the ...

Social relativism

By Musgrave, Alan

People in different societies have very different beliefs and systems of belief. To understand such diversity is a prime task of the student of society. The task is ...

Social theory and law

By Cotterrell, Roger

Social theory embodies the claim that philosophical analyses, reflections on specific historical experience and systematic empirical observations of social conditions may be combined to construct theoretical explanations of ...

Prediction in the social sciences

see Social sciences, prediction in.

Functionalism in social science

By Bigelow, John C.

In the social sciences, functionalists are theorists who give an especially prominent role to functional explanations. One of the most influential self-defined functionalists, Malinowski (1926), summed up this ...

Positivism in the social sciences

By Kincaid, Harold

Positivism originated from separate movements in nineteenth-century social science and early twentieth-century philosophy. Key positivist ideas were that philosophy should be scientific, that metaphysical speculations are meaningless, that ...

Social science, methodology of

By Rosenberg, Alex

Each of the sciences, the physical, biological, social and behavioural, have emerged from philosophy in a process that began in the time of Euclid and Plato. These sciences ...