Scientific Discovery in the Social Sciences (eBook)

This volume offers selected papers exploring issues arising from scientific discovery in the social sciences. It features a range of disciplines including behavioural sciences, computer science, finance, and statistics with an emphasis on philosophy.

The first of the three parts examines methods of social scientific discovery. Chapters investigate the nature of causal analysis, philosophical issues around scale development in behavioural science research, imagination in social scientific practice, and relationships between paradigms of inquiry and scientific fraud. The next part considers the practice of social science discovery. Chapters discuss the lack of genuine scientific discovery in finance where hypotheses concern the cheapness of securities, the logic of scientific discovery in macroeconomics, and the nature of that what discovery with the Solidarity movement as a case study. The final part covers formalising theories in social science. Chapters analyse the abstract model theory of institutions as a way of representing the structure of scientific theories, the semi-automatic generation of cognitive science theories, and computational process models in the social sciences.

The volume offers a unique perspective on scientific discovery in the social sciences. It will engage scholars and students with a multidisciplinary interest in the philosophy of science and social science.

Mark Addis is a Research Associate at the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics. He was Professor of Philosophy at Birmingham City University and a visiting professor at the Department of Culture and Society at Aarhus University. He has published in the areas of the history of analytic philosophy and the philosophies of mind and science.

Peter Lane is Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire. He has published in the area of learning algorithms and their applications especially with respect to cognitive architecture models of human attention and learning, machine learning theory and applications, and methodologies for the development of scientific software and models.

Peter Sozou is Research Associate at the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has published in a number of areas particularly the modelling of complex systems and decision theory.

Fernand Gobet is Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Liverpool and Research Associate at the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has written four books on the psychology of expertise and talent, one book about modelling techniques, co-edited a book on problem gambling as well as publishing many articles including a substantial number in top journals.