The Ant Trap presents a new model of the social world and the foundations of the social sciences. It shows that the actions and intentions of social groups often depend on more than their members. (Oxford University Press, 2015)...
This paper sets out an organizing framework for the field of social ontology—the study of the nature of the social world. I define and explain two different inquiries: the study of the grounding of social facts, and the study of how social categories are “anchored”...
Individualists about social ontology hold that social facts are “built out of” facts about individuals. In this paper, I argue that there are two distinct kinds of individualism about social ontology, two different ways individual people might be the metaphysical “builders” of the social world....
How do we fix the reference of a proper name? More importantly, why is that the way we fix reference? I sketch a new pragmatic approach to the justification of reference-fixing procedures. Comparing reference to other relations whose instances are introduced through "initiation" procedures, I...
This piece for The Stone argues that we as a society are already well underway in redefining marriage. Conservatives often use the terminology "redefining marriage" as political code. The piece argues for a sociological view of the institution of marriage. The courts do not have...
When can modelers tune their models, after the fact? We argue that "tweaking" a simulation can be effective but that there are two central risks. First, it risks overfitting the simulation to the data and thus compromising predictive accuracy; and second, it risks compromising the...
In a recent article, Harold Noonan argues that application conditions and criteria of identity are not distinct from one another. This seems to threaten the standard approach to distinguishing sortals from adjectival terms. I propose that his observation, while correct, does not have this consequence....
Many theorists, including Nietzsche, Adorno, and Foucault, have regarded genealogy as an important technique for social criticism. But it has been unclear how genealogy can go beyond the accomplishments of other, more mundane, critical methods. I propose a new approach to understanding the critical potential...
Do people in other cultures have different “standards of rationality”? Are the standards of reasoning and rationality in divination, religious practice, and textual exegesis different from those in the sciences? I discuss recent developments in philosophy that approach the issue from a number of new...
A paper on some implications of new work on the nature of groups, for modeling in the social sciences. Here I focus on economic models of corruption. (Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 2008)...
