Harold Kincaid

Defending Laws in the Social Sciences

This article defends laws in the social sciences. Arguments against social laws are considered and rejected based on the open nature of social theory, the multiple realizability of social predicates, the macro and/or teleological nature of social laws, and the inadequacies of belief-desire psychology. The more serious problem that social laws are usually qualified ceteris paribus is then considered. How the natural sciences handle ceteris paribus laws is discussed and it is argued that such procedures are possible in the social sciences. The article ends by arguing that at least some social research is roughly as well as confirmed as good work in evolutionary biology and ecology.

Debating the Reality of Social Classes

This article first surveys a significant set of issues that are intertwined in asking whether social classes are real. It distinguishes two different notions of class: class as organized social entities and class as types of individuals based on individual characteristics. There is good evidence for some classes as social entities—ruling classes and underclasses in some societies—but other classes in contemporary society are sometimes best thought of in terms of types, not social entities. Implications are drawn for pluralist accounts of social classification and the individualism-holism dispute.

First Evidence of Comorbidity of Problem Gambling and Other Psychiatric Problems in a Representative Urban Sample of South Africa

We investigate the extent to which problem gambling in a recent South African sample, as measured by the Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI), is comorbid with depression, anxiety and substance abuse. Data are from the 2010 South African National Urban Prevalence Study of Gambling Behavior. A representative sample of the urban adult population in South Africa (Nxa0=xa03,000). Responses to the 9-item PGSI and ratings on the Beck Depression Index, the Beck Anxiety Inventory, and the World Health Organization Alcohol, Smoking and Substance Involvement Screening Tool (WHO ASSIST). Cross tabulations and Chi square analyses along with logistic regression analyses with and without controls for socio-demographic and/or socio-economic variables were used to identify comorbidities. The prevalence of depression, anxiety, alcohol and substance use were clearly higher among the sample at risk for problem gambling. Black African racial status and living in areas characterized by migrant mining workers was associated with increased risk of problem gambling and comorbidities. There is strong evidence that findings of comorbidities between pathological gambling and depression, anxiety and substance abuse in developed countries generalize to the developing country of South Africa. Historical context, however, gives those comorbidities a unique demographic distribution.

Dead Ends and Live Issues in the Individualism-Holism Debate

After opening with some metaphilosophical preliminaries sketching a naturalist framework that guides the paper, I devote my discussion to identifying dead and live issues in the traditional individualism-holism debate. The third section discusses standard reductionist theses about theory reduction. Arguments given for and against such claims has been conceptual in nature and thus to my mind misguided. However, the empirical evidence against reducibility now seems overwhelming. More dead ends will be the topic of the fourth section, where I will discuss claims that society does not exist and claims that social mechanisms require accounts in terms of individuals. In the last Section I look at numerous places in the social sciences where there are interesting open issues around the individualism-holism controversy. Those issues are about how holist or individualist we must or can be in senses I specify. The live issues in the individualism-holism debate are not global ones to be decided on general conceptual grounds but local and contextual empirical debates about how far we can get by proceeding without institutional and social detail.

A More Sophisticated Merton

An alternative account of Merton to that provided by Turner is sketched. It shows strong similarities to some quite plausible contemporary understandings of science in general. Given this reading, it would seem that Merton did not drastically change his position nor does it suffer from the ambiguities that Turner describes.

Formal Rationality and Its Pernicious Effects on the Social Sciences

This article argues that a particular notion of rationality, more exactly a specific notion of legitimate inference, is presupposed by much work in the social sciences to their detriment. The author describes the notion of rationality he has in mind, explains why it is misguided, identifies where and how it affects social research, and illustrates why that research is weaker as a result. The notion of legitimate inference the author has in mind is one that believes inferences are guided by principles that are formal, universal and a priori—that is, that make no substantive, domain-specific empirical assumptions about the world. The author briefly provides a variety of reasons to be skeptical about such principles. Those reasons extend from broad philosophical considerations to quasi-empirical evidence. The author then argues that this notion of inference is involved with both the practice and the content of the social sciences in various ways. In terms of practice, this notion of inference lies behind the way statistical testing is generally done in the social sciences. In terms of content, the author argues that this notion of rationality is invoked, for example, in game theory and in rational expectations macroeconomics. In all cases, use of the formal rationality notion leads social scientists to put more faith in their results than is warranted and thus is an obstacle to doing better social science.

Why be a methodological individualist

In the recent methodological individualism-holism debate on explanation, there has been considerable focus on what reasons methodological holists may advance in support of their position. We believe it is useful to approach the other direction and ask what considerations methodological individualists may in fact offer in favor of their view about explanation. This is the background for the question we pursue in this paper: Why be a methodological individualist? We start out by introducing the methodological individualism-holism debate while distinguishing two forms of methodological individualism: a form that says that individualist explanations are always better than holist accounts and a form that says that providing intervening individualist mechanisms always makes for better explanations than purely holist ones. Next, we consider four lines of reasoning in support of methodological individualism: arguments from causation, from explanatory depth, from agency, and from normativity. We argue that none of them offer convincing reasons in support of the two explanatory versions of individualism we consider. While there may well be occasions in which individualists’ favorite explanations are superior, we find no reason to think this always must be the case.

Debating the Reality of Race, Caste, and Ethnicity:

There is a lively ongoing debate among philosophers and social scientists about the reality of race and among social scientists about the reality of caste and ethnicity. This paper tries to sort out what the issues are and makes some preliminary suggestions about what the evidence shows. Standard philosophical analyses try to find the necessary and sufficient conditions of our concept of race. I argue that this is not the best way to approach the issue and that the reality of these concepts should be taken as a scientific realism question; that is, do our best social scientific accounts of these phenomena show that appealing to the concepts of race, caste, and ethnicity is essential to successful social science explanation? I argue that in some cases that is the case and lay out the empirical issues involved.