Conference on the Philosophy of the Social Sciences 2011
August 25 & 26 2011 – University of Copenhagen
The conference is the first of a series of two conferences on the philosophy of the social sciences to be held at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. The second will take place in August 2012. The conferences are part of a plan to establish a tradition of annual European conferences on the philosophy of the social sciences.
The philosophy of the social sciences is concerned with the multifarious philosophical issues raised by the social sciences. The 2011 conference highlights two questions.
One is the societal role of the social sciences. The social sciences can no longer hope to play the role of authoritative yet normatively neutral “social technologies”, modeled upon the (presumed) role of the natural sciences, which they aspired to fulfill in the decades following WW2. Not only has that role suffered heavy erosion, even for the natural sciences, due to post-positivist criticism of science; on top of that, post-modernism has induced pervasive skepticism about social science’s ability to tell “grand narratives” about society that could provide guidance for such endeavours. So the question today is what role is left for a social science that produces “small narratives”, often mutually conflicting.
The other question is the issue of methodological individualism versus methodological holism. One way in which to approach this dispute is from the perspective of working social scientists: In light of their concerns and interests, what constitutes a fruitful way in which to specify the disagreement? How should a distinction between individual level and social level accounts be drawn? And who is right and on what grounds?
Keynote Speakers:
Patrick Baert (University of Cambridge)
Harold Kincaid (University of Alabama at Birmingham)
Mark Risjord (Emory University)
Mark Turner (Case Western Reserve University)
Registration
Registration for the conference is required – though there is no registration fee. To register, please send an email to Julie Zahle with your name and affiliation no later than August 15 2011.
Organizers:
Finn Collin (Section of Philosophy, University of Copenhagen)
Julie Zahle (Section of Philosophy, University of Copenhagen)