Social epigenetics: a science of social science?

Social science. Computational social science.

The science in social science.

A recent poll showed that most people think of science as technology and engineering--life-saving drugs, computers, space exploration, and so on. This was, in fact, the promise of the founders of modern science in the 17th century. It is less commonly understood that social and behavioral sciences have also produced technologies and engineering that dominate our everyday lives. These include po...

Social Dynamics of Science

The birth and decline of disciplines are critical to science and society. How do scientific disciplines emerge? No quantitative model to date allows us to validate competing theories on the different roles of endogenous processes, such as social collaborations, and exogenous events, such as scientific discoveries. Here we propose an agent-based model in which the evolution of disciplines is gui...

Philosophy of social science

Stephen Turner proposes to provide a philosophical analysis of a family of concepts falling under the general heading of " social practice " : the notion of a tacit set of rules, norms, or presuppositions that inform behavior in a given cultural milieu and that are socially authoritative and causally influential. Examples include: skills of the carpenter, passed on from master to apprentice; kn...

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