William Epstein
Biographic Data
| ID | 3745360 |
|---|---|
| NAME | William Epstein |
| GIVEN NAMES | William |
| FAMILY NAME | Epstein |
| SIGNATURE | EPSTEIN W |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Nevada, Las Vegas |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7962-3814 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 62 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 64 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 61 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1928 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Climate Change, Social Inequality, and Doom
A critical examination of how inequality and cultural inertia hinder meaningful climate action.The challenges of climate change, like so many issues today, are not evenly distributed across social and economic lines. In this sobering exploration of the interconnected crises of climate change and social inequality, William M. Epstein examines how entrenched cultural values and systemic inequities thwart meaningful climate action, driving humanity …
Squatting at Bethlehem: A Response to Stoesz’s Human Service Cartels
Stoesz’s essay is largely an institutional critique of social work—attentive to the field’s choices as though they were autonomous of the society. The analysis is broadened to acknowledge the systemic underpinnings of social work’s institutional presence. Reference is made to contemporary and historical events
The Masses are the Ruling Classes
The Masses Are the Ruling Classes handles a neglected theme: social policy in the United States is determined by mass consent. Contemporary explanations of decision making in the United States typically attribute power over policy making to a variety of hidden forces and illegitimate elites, holding the masses innocent of their own problems. Yet the enormous openness of the society and nearly universal suffrage sustain democratic consent as more …
Spiritualism, Religion, and Other Romantic Quests for the Authentic Self
Chapter 4 explores the quest for the authentic self in illuminations of the true self, in theories of organizational leadership, and in other sorts of personal quests for the authentic soul. The national investment in romantic quests sustains the preferences for social efficiency, superstition, and quick authenticity. These preferences supplant serious material attempts to repair inequality and begin to explain the minimalism and the underlying a…
Year Up: Policy Romanticism, Democratic Populism, and Social Welfare in America
Chapter 5 describes, evaluates, and reinterprets the private sector social service program Year Up as a ceremony of social values rather than as a successful response to a social problem. The program is intended to provide poor minority urban youths access to the job market by offering short-term academic and skills training. Its claims to success are based on contracted evaluations that are not credible. In the end, Year Up embodies a mythic obl…
The Dilemma of American Social Welfare
In the current political climate of the U.S., there are noeasily apparent solutions to the social problems we face.William M. Epstein claims that people in need have been poorly served and misled by the American system of social welfare. This is one of those rare works emanating from a social welfare expert that does not offer easy placebos or simplistic claims based on more money.The Dilemma of American Social Welfare argues against the idea tha…
Empowerment as Ceremony
Many people in the United States are poor, lead marginal lives, and need jobs as well as basic services such as education, medical care, and housing. Multitudes in other parts of the world, in addition to being poor, are jailed, tortured, and killed for being members of the wrong ethnic group or expressing political opinions. Those who argue for empowerment claim it is a magic bullet. It can liberate the oppressed, largely through self-organizati…
The Romantic Retreat Is Not Club Med
“Feminist standpoint epistemology” is not a serious philosophy but a romantic evasion of the application of science to social services. There are numerous limitations to the application of the scientific method to the practice of social work and the social services. Nonetheless, a pragmatic approach to understanding social reality and the evaluation of social interventions is more desirable than feminist standpoint epistemology. Yet the romantic …
The Importance of Being Civil: The Struggle for Political Decency
Strict Slaves of Slogans: Response to “The Social Work Cartel”
The corruption of the social work enterprise is not simply episodic but systemic and long-standing including education, research, governance, and practice. Reform is unlikely since the constituency within the field and outside of it that wishes to change the situation is small and ineffective. The corruption of social work reflects the unfortunate social values of the nation that refuses to allocate sufficient resources to address deep social pro…
Visual PerceptionAuthor's Note: Original version supported by NEI grant R01 EY 12926‐06; revision supported by NSF grant BCS 1027120/1027259. Correspondence: MK & WE—Department of Psychology, PO Box 4…
This chapter consists of tutorials on three theoretical and methodological issues in visual perception: (a) Foundational questions: the functions of vision, the relationship between percepts and visual neurons, the concept of information, the notion of representation and representational transformation, the relationship between perception and cognition, the concept of modularity and the place of illusions in the development of perceptual theory. …
Romantic Social Work
Romanticism, community and social services
A society engages in policy romanticism when it maintains a tenacious attachment to distorted assertions about reality that are institutionalized in both the public and private sectors.The invocation of community to commend a sublime subjectivity that pre-empts questioning is realized in the concept of social capital.Community and social capital are both romantic notions buttressing American public policies that maintain great inequalities and ig…
Prisoners of Splenda: An Essay Review
Response bias in opinion polls and American social welfare
Response bias and notably response falsification undercut the usefulness of opinion polls in characterizing collective American attitudes toward social welfare. The attitudes polled in surveys such as the General Social Survey (GSS) and the National Election Studies (NSS) appear to be customarily sensitive, often evidencing very large amounts of response falsification that obscure the degree of consensus for America's bifurcated social welfare sy…
Cleavage in American Attitudes toward Social Welfare
Opinion polls probing both the narrow and broad senses of social welfare among Americans indicate hardly any substantial differences over crucial social sentiments among a variety of groups with at least theoretically divergent interests: rich and poor, men and women, blacks and whites, a variety of ethnic groups, union and nonunion households. The items mainly concern the provision of welfare to the poor through AFDC, now TANF, and Food Stamps b…
The Role of Effort in Perceiving Distance
Berkeley proposed that space is perceived in terms of effort. Consistent with his proposal, the present studies show that perceived egocentric distance increases when people are encumbered by wearing a heavy backpack or have completed a visual-motor adaptation that reduces the anticipated optic flow coinciding with walking effort. In accord with Berkeley's proposal and Gibson's theory of affordances, these studies show that the perception of spat…
The futility of pragmatic reform: The Casey foundation in New York City
Children Who Could Have Been: The Legacy of Child Welfare in Wealthy America
William Epstein takes an unblinking look at the failure of public child welfare in America. The paltry response to children in need, Epstein contends, opens windows onto the nation s soul, revealing a profoundly disturbing lack of generosity in the face of deserving and needy children. Epstein analyzes in detail the decay of the child welfare system through the case histories of Natalie and Adam, two children who have spent their lives in and out…
In the Beginning
Review Articles| November 05 1999 In the Beginning: An Essay Review of P.J. Kellman and M.E. Arterberry The Cradle of Knowledge1 Subject Area: Psychiatry and Psychology , Women's and Children's Health William Epstein William Epstein University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va., USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Human Development (1999) 42 (5): 271–277. https://doi.org/10.1159/000022635 Article history P…
Wasted: The Failure of the Child Welfare System and the Plight of America's Unwanted Children
Welfare in America: How Social Science Fails the Poor
Welfare in America is a scathing attack on the social scientists, policy makers, and politicians responsible for programs meant to help our nation's poorest citizens. William M. Epstein charges that most current social welfare programs are not held to credible standards in their design or their results. Rather than spending less on such research and programs, however, Epstein suggests we should spend much more, and do the job right. The American …
Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State
What money can't buy
Social science, child welfare, and family preservation: A failure of rationality in public policy
The Sensory Core and the Medieval Foundations of Early Modern Perceptual Theory
This article seeks the origin, in the theories of Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), Descartes, and Berkeley, of two-stage theories of spatial perception, which hold that visual perception involves both an immediate representation of the proximal stimulus in a two-dimensional ‘‘sensory core’’ and also a subsequent perception of the three dimensional world. The works of Ibn al-Haytham, Descartes, and Berkeley already frame the major theoretical options tha…
Why States Go—And Don't Go—Nuclear
The incentives and disincentives for countries to go nuclear comprise a combination of military, political, and economic concerns and motivations. These vary over time for different countries. For countries allied to one of the two nuclear superpowers, concern about their military security is not a predominant factor, while it is the decisive one for the non-nuclear countries who are not under the nuclear umbrella of a superpower and who perceive…
Science and Social Work
Social work research has failed to comply with a scientific standard. Because of this failure, practice is indeterminate and the field is deprived of valid demonstrations of its ability to cure, prevent, or rehabilitate. Social work's difficulties in complying with a scientific standard may not be able to be resolved because of inherent problems of social work practice. It is suggested that a scientific standard is inappropriate for social work a…
Social science, child welfare, and family preservation: A failure of rationality in public policy
Confirmational Response Bias Among Social Work Journals
This article reports the results of a study of confirmational response bias among social work journals. A contrived research paper with positive findings and its negative mirror image were submitted to two different groups of social work journals and to two comparison groups of journals outside social work. The quantitative results, suggesting bias, are tentative; but the qualitative findings based upon an analysis of the referee comments are cle…
The current status of the size-distance hypotheses
In the history of the psychology of perception few matters have been of more continuous interest than the relationship between perceived size and perceived distance. It is our objective to examine the current status of this question by reviewing the recent literature. With some exceptions our review will be confined to investigations which have been reported since 1952. Several surveys of the literature prior to 1952 are available, and for this r…
Empowerment as Ceremony
Many people in the United States are poor, lead marginal lives, and need jobs as well as basic services such as education, medical care, and housing. Multitudes in other parts of the world, in addition to being poor, are jailed, tortured, and killed for being members of the wrong ethnic group or expressing political opinions. Those who argue for empowerment claim it is a magic bullet. It can liberate the oppressed, largely through self-organizati…
Strict Slaves of Slogans: Response to “The Social Work Cartel”
The corruption of the social work enterprise is not simply episodic but systemic and long-standing including education, research, governance, and practice. Reform is unlikely since the constituency within the field and outside of it that wishes to change the situation is small and ineffective. The corruption of social work reflects the unfortunate social values of the nation that refuses to allocate sufficient resources to address deep social pro…
Response bias in opinion polls and American social welfare
Response bias and notably response falsification undercut the usefulness of opinion polls in characterizing collective American attitudes toward social welfare. The attitudes polled in surveys such as the General Social Survey (GSS) and the National Election Studies (NSS) appear to be customarily sensitive, often evidencing very large amounts of response falsification that obscure the degree of consensus for America's bifurcated social welfare sy…
A Response to Pardeck: Thump Therapy for Social Work Journals
The Obligation of Intellectuals
The controversy surrounding Confirmational Response Bias Among Social Work Journals (CRB; Epstein 1990) stems from its critical toneespecially in earlier drafts, its unflattering findings, and its use of deception to study journal publication processes. If the tone of CRB had rung a less challenging note; if its qualitative analysis had been summed up as a whispered reminder that social work referees might profit from greater attention to their c…
The status of the minimum principle in the theoretical analysis of visual perception
We examine a number of investigations of perceptual economy or, more specifically, of minimum tendencies and minimum principles in the visual perception of form, depth, and motion. A minimum tendency is a psychophysical finding that perception tends toward simplicity, as measured in accordance with a specified metric. A minimum principle is a theoretical construct imputed to the visual system to explain minimum tendencies. After examining a numbe…
Shape constancy: Functional relationships and theoretical formulations
In the 1st section empirical findings concerning shape constancy are reviewed under 10 headings: the occurrence of compromise, conditions of observation, degree of orientation, observation attitude, familiarity and representativeness, differences between forms, individual differences, background effects, effects of movement, exposure time and intensity. The 2nd section deals with several theoretical accounts of shape constancy. The shape-slant in…
Romantic Social Work
Romanticism, community and social services
A society engages in policy romanticism when it maintains a tenacious attachment to distorted assertions about reality that are institutionalized in both the public and private sectors.The invocation of community to commend a sublime subjectivity that pre-empts questioning is realized in the concept of social capital.Community and social capital are both romantic notions buttressing American public policies that maintain great inequalities and ig…
Prisoners of Splenda: An Essay Review
The futility of pragmatic reform: The Casey foundation in New York City
Professionalization of social work: The American experience
(1992). Professionalization of social work: The American experience. The Social Science Journal: Vol. 29, No. 2, pp. 153-166
Rational claims to effectiveness in social work's critical literature
Social work's preoccupation with psychotherapeutics and the enormous pressure to prove the field's outcome effectiveness on scientific grounds are tied into the metaphor of “helping.” Yet social work's outcome studies and its discussion of those studies in its critical literature are neither scientifically credible nor usually coherent in the profound sense of science. This article reviews social work's outcome studies up to 1983 and discusses th…
Judge David Jenkins and the great civil war
UN special session on disarmament: How much progress
(1978). UN special session on disarmament: How much progress? Survival: Vol. 20, No. 6, pp. 248-254
Nuclear proliferation: The failure of the review conference
A German Folk House
Journal Article A German Folk House Get access W. Epstein W. Epstein Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Forces, Volume 7, Issue 2, December 1928, Pages 253–257, https://doi.org/10.2307/2570150 Published: 01 December 1928
Evidence for Incremental Processes in Associative Learning
The current status of the size-distance hypotheses
In the history of the psychology of perception few matters have been of more continuous interest than the relationship between perceived size and perceived distance. It is our objective to examine the current status of this question by reviewing the recent literature. With some exceptions our review will be confined to investigations which have been reported since 1952. Several surveys of the literature prior to 1952 are available, and for this r…
Backward Association as a Function as Meaningfulness
Temporal Schemata in Syntactically Structured Material
Shape constancy: Functional relationships and theoretical formulations
In the 1st section empirical findings concerning shape constancy are reviewed under 10 headings: the occurrence of compromise, conditions of observation, degree of orientation, observation attitude, familiarity and representativeness, differences between forms, individual differences, background effects, effects of movement, exposure time and intensity. The 2nd section deals with several theoretical accounts of shape constancy. The shape-slant in…
Examination of Gibson's psychophysical hypothesis
The experimental evidence regarding Gibson's psychophysical hypothesis is examined. The presentation is divided into 2 sections dealing with static and transforming stimulation, respectively. Under the former heading the stimulation for surface, slant, and depth is considered. Under the latter heading the investigations of motion perspective, continuous perspective transformations, and size-transformations are examined. 2 general conclusions emer…
Experimental investigations of the genesis of visual space perception
The methodology and findings of 3 categories of experimental studies are reviewed and evaluated: (a) studies of organisms that have been deprived of visual stimulation until the time of testing, (b) studies of newborn organisms that are tested soon after birth, and (c) studies in which E controls the visual stimulation to which 0 is exposed from birth to the time of testing. The evidence provided by these experiments suggests that conclusions abo…
Nuclear proliferation: The failure of the review conference
Why States Go—And Don't Go—Nuclear
The incentives and disincentives for countries to go nuclear comprise a combination of military, political, and economic concerns and motivations. These vary over time for different countries. For countries allied to one of the two nuclear superpowers, concern about their military security is not a predominant factor, while it is the decisive one for the non-nuclear countries who are not under the nuclear umbrella of a superpower and who perceive…
Another Lost Opportunity
UN special session on disarmament: How much progress
(1978). UN special session on disarmament: How much progress? Survival: Vol. 20, No. 6, pp. 248-254
The Sensory Core and the Medieval Foundations of Early Modern Perceptual Theory
This article seeks the origin, in the theories of Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), Descartes, and Berkeley, of two-stage theories of spatial perception, which hold that visual perception involves both an immediate representation of the proximal stimulus in a two-dimensional ‘‘sensory core’’ and also a subsequent perception of the three dimensional world. The works of Ibn al-Haytham, Descartes, and Berkeley already frame the major theoretical options tha…
Issues of principle and expediency in the controversy over prohibitions to ecclesiastical courts in England
The historical foundation of the methodology of American legal education
(1981). The historical foundation of the methodology of American legal education. The Journal of Legal History: Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 3-29
Arms Control II
Judge David Jenkins and the great civil war
Get Thee to a Shelter
Psychotherapy and surrogate care, the two basic strategies for providing services to battered women, are criticized against outcome evidence of their reliability and efficacy. Surrogate care is shown to be the more desirable service approach. Some implications of this conclusion for the helping professions are enumerated
Conflagration or Concord: The Search for a Brave New Peace
The status of the minimum principle in the theoretical analysis of visual perception
We examine a number of investigations of perceptual economy or, more specifically, of minimum tendencies and minimum principles in the visual perception of form, depth, and motion. A minimum tendency is a psychophysical finding that perception tends toward simplicity, as measured in accordance with a specified metric. A minimum principle is a theoretical construct imputed to the visual system to explain minimum tendencies. After examining a numbe…
The committee for examinations and parliamentary justice, 1642–1647
(1986). The committee for examinations and parliamentary justice, 1642–1647. The Journal of Legal History: Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 3-22
Science and Social Work
Social work research has failed to comply with a scientific standard. Because of this failure, practice is indeterminate and the field is deprived of valid demonstrations of its ability to cure, prevent, or rehabilitate. Social work's difficulties in complying with a scientific standard may not be able to be resolved because of inherent problems of social work practice. It is suggested that a scientific standard is inappropriate for social work a…
Family Therapy: Reply
Family Therapy: Reply William M. Epstein William M. Epstein Integrated Mental Health, Inc.Rochester, New York Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social Work, Volume 32, Issue 1, January-February 1987, Page 96, https://doi.org/10.1093/sw/32.1.96-a Published: 01 January 1987
Our Town: A Case Study of Ideology and the Private Social Welfare Sector
This case study explores the relationship between ideology and the performance of the voluntary social welfare sector in Western New York. Data were collected from the directors of 22 of the largest and most important voluntary social welfare agencies relating to their own social attitudes and those of their boards. The common expression of similar agency attitudes toward a variety of social policies were in narrow conformity with the conservativ…
Studying Journal Editors: The Worst Heresy
Political science (42 works) · Sociology (34 works) · Law (33 works) · Law (26 works) · Psychology (25 works) · Social Work Education and Practice (13 works) · Social Work (12 works) · Social Psychology (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Welfare (10 works)