yanna

• Social Ontology


  Questions regarding the nature of social reality and how one ought to go about explaining social facts, relations, and processes
• Social Ontology


  The study of the nature and properties of the social world
• Social Ontology is concerned with analyzing the various entities in the world that arise from social interaction
• Sophism


  A school of Greek philosophy in the fifth century BCE
• Social entities as products of covenants

  Hobbes analyzes covenants in terms of agreements, and also provides an analysis of agreement, a crucial part of which is to explain what makes agreements binding
• Social entities as products of conventions

  Alternative to 'compact' or 'agreement uses the term 'convention' as the basis for law and language
• Social entities as products of God and Nature


  Locke sees God and nature as the sources of the state and of property. Locke rejects Filmer's comparison of the state with a family, arguing instead that political authority has its source in the natural rights of each individual created equally
• Social entities as products of individual mind

  A nominal essence is a definition of a species or sort of thing, which people assemble in their minds out of ideas
• Ontological collectivism


  View that there are social entities that exist, and these entities are on par with individual human beings
• Ontological individualism


  There are no non-reducible social entities only individual exist
• Methodological collectivism


  View that social phenomena cannot be explained solely in terms of individuals and their intentional states. One must appeal to other social facts
• Methodological individualism


  Individual actions and individual intentional states are the basis of all explanations of social phenomena
• Interralationism


  The idea that social groups, processes, and relations are to be explained by reference to individual human agents and the relations between them
• Holism


  Has sometimes been confused with what I am here calling 'collectivism'
• Holism


  Human agents depend non-causally on their social relations with one another for the possession of distinctive human capacities. (have only capacity to think)
• Atomism


  Defends the opposite view. Possible for human beings to develop all the capacities characteristic of human beings in complete isolation from other humans
• Holism and Atomism are theories about the capacities of individual human beings
• Methodological individualism and collectivism are theories about social groups and the relationship between social groups and the individual
• Social Group


  A collection of people that interact with one another on the basis of shared attitudes
• Social Group


  • A jury that meets to deliberate about a case and never meets again
  • Two people that unite to perform an action (e.g. moving a table) and then quickly disperse
• Eliminavist


  Argues that social groups do not exist and talk of social groups and their properties refers only to individuals and their properties
• Functional structure and individuals play a role in helping to instantiate that structure
• Biological makeup or innate factors

  • Genes
  • Hormones
  • Neurosystem structures and processes
• Social environment or learning

  • Parental influence
  • School
  • Media exposure
  • Peer relations
• Crime, especially violent crime

  Expression of aggressive dispositions on the part of individuals
• Questions about crime


  Questions about the individuals who commit crimes
• Factors that may account for the development of aggressive dispositions in individuals

  • Biological factors (genes, hormones, brain structures)
  • Environmental factors (experience of abuse as a child, exposure to media violence, exposure to local actual violence)
• There is no 'murder gene'
• 'Classical' or 'quantitative, behavior genetics'


  Analyses phenotypic variance (the degree of variation in a trait) in a given population by correlating measured behavioral variation with measured biological relatedness and unrelatedess
• Biologically related individuals are more likely to share the behavior of starting fights on the playground than are biologically unrelated individuals
• Molecular behavior genetics


  Attempts to identify the heritable biological component shared by individuals expressing a particular trait
• 'Social-environmental approaches'


  Seek to identify determinants of behavior within the social environment, discriminating among different environmental factors
• 'Neurobiological research on behavior'


  Seeks to identify the neural structures and processes involved in behavior, linking phenomena like variation in serotonin metabolism or frontal lobe size with variations in aggressively
• The 'broken windows' theory proposes that the accumulated uncorrected evidence of small, unpunished acts of vandalism or law-breaking morphs into higher rates of criminal activity
• The 'collective efficacy' theory proposes that different rates of collective community engagement can account for different rates of criminal activity in different neighborhoods
• The world does not come to us in neat packages to which we can simply apply our measuring instruments
• Researchers have to start with some kind of correlation and then find ways to refine their measurements and correlations within the domain
• Charles Darwin


  Origin of Species; The Descent of Man
• Questions about differences between groups are questions about population-level differences
• Questions about differences between individuals are questions about the difference in factors that affect individuals