28 Mar
2025
28 Mar
'25
2:48 p.m.
Dear all,
we warmly invite you to the next APSE (Applied Philosophy of Science and
Epistemology) talk and Reading Circle. The talk will be held by Anna
Alexandrova (University of Cambridge).
Talk:
When: Thursday, 03.04.2025, 15:00 - 17:00
Where: HS 3A, NIG (Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Wien)
Title & abstract:
Social Science: A Constructivist Account
What sort of inquiry is social science? This question used to preoccupy
philosophers but fell off their agenda due to a stalemate between
so-called naturalists, who took the ideal to be natural science, and
exceptionalists, who allied social sciences with humanities. I show that
both positions commit the error of contrastivism, namely defining social
science in contrast to these two traditions, which inevitably ends up
caricaturing them. Using recent advances in philosophy, I formulate
constructivism about social sciences, a view that denies an essence to
this inquiry and grounds it in the needs of communities to understand
and improve themselves.
Reading Circle:
When: right before the talk - Thursday, 03.04.2025, 13:00 - 15:00
Where: same place - HS 3A, NIG (Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Wien)
We will focus our discussion on a forthcoming article by Anna
Alexandrova (attached pdf):
Alexandrova, Anna. (forthcoming) "Social Science: A Constructivist
Account"
As introduction to Constructivism, we suggest this article (especially
Chapters 1 and 5):
Bagnoli, Carla, "Constructivism in Metaethics", The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri
Nodelman (eds.), URL =
<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2024/entries/constructivism-metaethics/>.
For further reading regarding the topic:
Anderson, Elizabeth. "Local Knowledge in Institutional Epistemology."
Australasian Philosophical Review (2024): 1-23.
Longino, Helen E. (1990). Science as Social Knowledge: Values and
Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry. Princeton University Press.
Risjord, M. W. (2022). PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE : a contemporary
introduction. (Second edition.). ROUTLEDGE.
Best wishes,
Ella Berger and Vinzenz Fischer, on behalf of the APSE team