Social Philosophy of Science for the Social Sciences

Jaan Valsiner is a cultural psychologist with a consistently developmental axiomatic base that is brought to analyses of any psychological or social phenomena. He is the founding editor (1995) of the Sage journal, Culture & Psychology. And Editor-in-Chief of Springer's Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science. He has been Niels Bohr Professor of Cultural Psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark in 2013-2018 and Professeur invitee at University of Luxembourg (2013-2019). He has published and edited around 50 books, the most pertinent of which are his monographs The guided mind (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1998), Culture in minds and societies (New Delhi: Sage, 2007), and Ornamented Lives (Charlotte NC: Information Age, 2019). He has been awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize of 1995 in Germany, and the Hans-Kilian-Preis of 2017, for his interdisciplinary work on human development, as well as Senior Fulbright Lecturing Award in Brazil 1995-1997. He has been a visiting professor in Brazil, Japan, Australia, Estonia. Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.

Social sciences between knowledge and ideologies: need for philosophy.- Part I.  Social and cognitive roots for reflexivity upon the research process.- Social sciences, what for? On the manifold directions of social research.- Vitenskapsteori--  - what, how and why?.- Culture or Biology? If this sounds interesting, you might be confused.- Conditional Objectivism: A Strategy for Connecting the Social Sciences and Practical Decision-Making.- Towards Reflexivity in Science: Anthropological Reflections on Science and Society.- Part II.  Philosophies of explanation in the social sciences.- Explanation: guidance for social scientists.- From causality to catalysis in the social sciences.- How to identify and how to conduct research that is informative and reproducible.- Explaining social phenomena: Emergence and Levels of Explanation.- Part III.  Social normativity in social sciences.- Normativity in psychology and the social sciences: Questions of universality.- The crisis in psychological science, and the need for a person-oriented approach.- Open access, a remedy to the crisis in scientific inquiry?.- Part IV.   Social processes in particular sciences: challenges to interdisciplinarity.- Fragmented and Critical? Some challenges for a social organization of Norwegian sociology, and implications for innovation.- How do economists think?.- Part V.General Conclusion.- What can social science practitioners learn from philosophies of science?.- Index.