The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation
The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation

Author: Paul A. Roth

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2019-10-15

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0810140896

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In The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation, Paul A. Roth resolves disputes persisting since the nineteenth century about the scientific status of history. He does this by showing why historical explanations must take the form of a narrative, making their logic explicit, and revealing how the rational evaluation of narrative explanation becomes possible. Roth situates narrative explanations within a naturalistic framework and develops a nonrealist (irrealist) metaphysics and epistemology of history—arguing that there exists no one fixed past, but many pasts. The book includes a novel reading of Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, showing how it offers a narrative explanation of theory change in science. This book will be of interest to researchers in historiography, philosophy of history, philosophy of science, philosophy of social science, and epistemology.

The Logic of History
The Logic of History

Author: C. Behan McCullagh

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2004-03

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1134592949

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The Logic of History defends the practice of history as more reliable than has recently been acknowledged, arguing that historians make their accounts as fair as they can and avoid misleading their readers.

The Logic of the History of Ideas
The Logic of the History of Ideas

Author: Mark Bevir

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2002-06-20

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9780521016841

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Human cultures generate meanings, and the history of ideas, broadly conceived, is the study of these meanings. An adequate theory of culture must therefore rest on a suitable philosophical enquiry into the nature of the history of ideas. Mark Bevir's book explores the forms of reasoning appropriate to the history of ideas, enhancing our understanding by grappling with central questions such as: What is a meaning? What constitutes objective knowledge of the past? What are beliefs and traditions? How can we explain why people held the beliefs they did? The book ranges widely over issues and theorists associated with post-analytic philosophy, post-modernism, hermeneutics, literary theory, political thought, and social theory.

Logics of History
Logics of History

Author: William H. Sewell Jr.

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2009-07-27

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 0226749193

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While social scientists and historians have been exchanging ideas for a long time, they have never developed a proper dialogue about social theory. William H. Sewell Jr. observes that on questions of theory the communication has been mostly one way: from social science to history. Logics of History argues that both history and the social sciences have something crucial to offer each other. While historians do not think of themselves as theorists, they know something social scientists do not: how to think about the temporalities of social life. On the other hand, while social scientists’ treatments of temporality are usually clumsy, their theoretical sophistication and penchant for structural accounts of social life could offer much to historians. Renowned for his work at the crossroads of history, sociology, political science, and anthropology, Sewell argues that only by combining a more sophisticated understanding of historical time with a concern for larger theoretical questions can a satisfying social theory emerge. In Logics of History, he reveals the shape such an engagement could take, some of the topics it could illuminate, and how it might affect both sides of the disciplinary divide.

The Logic of Social Science
The Logic of Social Science

Author: James Mahoney

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-08-17

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 0691214956

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"Mahoney's starting point is the problem of essentialism in social science. Essentialism--the belief that the members of a category possess hidden properties ("essences") that make them members of the category and that endow them with a certain nature--is appropriate for scientific categories ("atoms", for instance) but not for human ones ("revolutions," for instance). Despite this, much social science research takes place from within an essentialist orientation; those who reject this assumption goes so far in the other direction as to reject the idea of an external reality, independent of human beings, altogether. Mahoney proposes an alternative approach that aspires to bridge this enduring rift in the social sciences between those who take a scientific approach and assume that social science categories correspond to external reality (and thus believe that the methods used in the natural sciences are generally appropriate for the social sciences) and those who take a constructivist approach and believe that because the categories used to understand the social world are humanly-constructed, they cannot possibly follow the science of the natural world. As the name suggests, scientific constructivism brings in aspects of both views and attempts to unite them. Drawing from cognitive science, it focuses on using the rational parts of our brain machinery to overcome the limitations and deeply seated biases (such as essentialism) of our evolved minds. Specifically, Mahoney puts forth a "set-theoretic analysis" that focuses on "sets" of categories as they exist in the mind that are also subject to the mathematical logic of set-theory. He spends the first four chapters of the book establishing the foundations and methods for set-theoretic analysis, the next four chapters looking and how this analysis fits with the existing tools of social science, and the final four chapters focusing on how this approach can be used to study and understand cases"--

Historian's Fallacie
Historian's Fallacie

Author: David H. Fischer

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 1970-12-30

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0061315451

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"If one laughs when David Hackett Fischer sits down to play, one will stay to cheer. His book must be read three times: the first in anger, the srcond in laughter, the third in respect....The wisdom is expressed with a certin ruthlessness. Scarcly a major historian escapes unscathed. Ten thousand members of the AmericanHistorical Association will rush to the index and breathe a little easier to find their names absent.

Fuzzy Logic and Mathematics
Fuzzy Logic and Mathematics

Author: Radim Bělohlávek

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 545

ISBN-13: 0190200014

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The main part of the book is a comprehensive overview of the development of fuzzy logic and its applications in various areas of human affair since its genesis in the mid 1960s. This overview is then employed for assessing the significance of fuzzy logic and mathematics based on fuzzy logic.

Money and Totality
Money and Totality

Author: Fred Moseley

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2015-09-29

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 9004301933

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This ambitious book presents a comprehensive new 'macro-monetary' interpretation of Marx’s logical method in Capital, based on substantial textual evidence, which emphasises two main points: (1) Marx’s theory is primarily a macroeconomic theory of the total surplus-value produced in the economy as a whole; and (2) Marx’s theory is a monetary theory from beginning to end and the circuit of money capital – M - C - M’ – is the logical framework of Marx’s theory. It follows from this 'macro-monetary' interpretation that, contrary to the prevailing view, there is no 'transformation problem' in Marx’s theory; i.e., Marx did not 'fail to transform the inputs of constant capital and variable capital' in his theory of prices of production in Part 2 of Volume III.

Navigating World History
Navigating World History

Author: P. Manning

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2003-05-15

Total Pages: 427

ISBN-13: 1403973857

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World history has expanded dramatically in recent years, primarily as a teaching field, and increasingly as a research field. Growing numbers of teachers and Ph.Ds in history are required to teach the subject. They must be current on topics from human evolution to industrial development in Song-dynasty China to today's disease patterns - and then link these disparate topics into a coherent course. Numerous textbooks in print and in preparation summarize the field of world history at an introductory level. But good teaching also requires advanced training for teachers, and access to a stream of new research from scholars trained as world historians. In this book, Patrick Manning provides the first comprehensive overview of the academic field of world history. He reviews patterns of research and debate, and proposes guidelines for study by teachers and by researchers in world history.