Ideas, Uncertainty, and Evolution

Bibliographic Data

ID23745693
AuthorsMark Blyth (0000-0001-7782-6183, corresponding author)
Year2010
Pages83-100
Publication date2010-12-10
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueIdeas and politics in social science research (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199736430.003.0005
OpenAlexW2477661613
ISBN9780199736430
LanguageEN
Citations received22

This chapter argues that ideational scholarship rests, implicitly or explicitly, on a particular way of looking at the world, a distinct social ontology. It uses this understanding to make the further case that unless one is practicing a self-consciously ideational social science, one might be, as Keynes famously put it, a Euclidian geometer in a non-Euclidian world. That is, to continue his geometric metaphor, we might live in world of knots and spheres, but without attending to ideas, social scientists are equipped to see only right angles and squares. In making this case, the chapter and this book as a whole move beyond the claim that ideas matter and that scholarship should “take them seriously”, and suggest instead that practicing social science without viewing ideas as fundamental to both the nature of human action and causation in social systems produces seriously misleading explanations.

Action (physics) · Causation · Epistemology · Metaphor · Ontology · Philosophy of social science · Political science · Scholarship · Social philosophy · Social relation · Social science · Sociology · Economic Theory and Institutions · Law · Philosophy

Tools

Open DOILibgen