What's Wrong with the Social Sciences? The Perils of the Postmodern

by Faia, Michael A.

• ISBN13: 9780819192363
• ISBN10: 0819192368
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1993-09-24
• Publisher: UPA

Summary

In this book, the author defends the positivist traditions of the social sciences. Contents: What's Wrong with the Social Sciences; In Praise of the Null Hypothesis: The Myth of "The Value-Free Myth"; Social Science Syntactics and Empirics: Alleged Problems...; ...And Happy Prospects; Cultural Materialism in the Systemic Mode; Social Science Semantics; A Sad Story; Index.

Table of Contents

Introduction
What's Wrong With the Social Sciences?	p. 1
The dialectics of disenchantment	p. 2
The trouble with feminist theory	p. 13
Titles and tribulations	p. 17
Solicitous gatekeepers, #1	p. 25
Itching and scratching: a Lazarsfeldian digression through an SPSS hologram	p. 27
Transcending the transcendentalists	p. 30
What do you presuppose, and when did you presuppose it? The Sisyphus of the social sciences	p. 33
The meaning of politics and the politics of meaning	p. 38
Michel Foucault, Machines Who Think, and the Human Sciences	p. 57
"Man the machine - man the impersonal engine"	p. 57
Good, bad, or ugly?	p. 67
Mitigating circumstances	p. 70
In conclusion: Oodles of Boodles	p. 74
Why Foucault needed Lindroth, and why Lindroth needed Foucault	p. 75
In Praise of the Null Hypothesis: The Myth of "The Value-Free Myth"	p. 83
The nature and extent of bias in scientific research	p. 83
Quashing the indictment: Can a Comtean rule a country?	p. 85
Quashing the indictment: The case against functional analysis	p. 89
Overturned on appeal: Research on political power	p. 101
A new hypothesis	p. 102
Conclusion: Science as bias control	p. 102
Social Science Syntactics and Empirics: Alleged Problems	p. 111
Three papers in search of an argument	p. 111
Solicitous gatekeepers, #2	p. 131
...and Happy Prospects	p. 141
Introduction	p. 141
Sex discrimination in faculty salaries: Toward projections of the middle range	p. 145
Allocating faculty salaries with Minitab BASIC, and allowing feedback from future states	p. 154
From a FIRM grip on reality to the AIDS epidemic: The future of social simulations	p. 156
Conclusions	p. 159
Cultural Materialism in the Systemic Mode	p. 171
An excursion into "cultural" functionalism	p. 171
The POET paradigm: A transcendence of hierarchy	p. 178
Rediprocal interaction: Organization and technology	p. 179
Social Science Semantics: A Sad Story	p. 195
Introduction	p. 195
Contemporary thesauri with taxonomic overtones	p. 200
The logic of taxonomics	p. 205
Sampling, search, and test strategies for Sociological Abstracts: Hierarchies without perks	p. 209
First conclusion	p. 214
Codicil 1991	p. 215
Frequencies and amplitudes: Toward a taxonomy of time series	p. 216
Online searches as a data source: Notes on the future of taxonomy	p. 219
Final conclusion	p. 223
Index
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