Analytical sociology is a middle-range approach to sociological theorizing which seeks to develop precise and realistic action-based explanations of various social phenomena. At the heart of the analytical approach is the idea that acceptable explanations must detail the mechanisms through which the phenomena to be explained were brought about. In this article I discuss the most important eleme...

This article presents the main features and objectives of the so-called «social mechanisms based explanation» or «analytical sociology». This perspective has gained quite considerable attention in contemporary debate, both for its theoretical novelty as well as for its empirical results. In the first part of the article I describe the key concepts, main scholars and institutional strengths of t...

The aim of this article is to describe the evolution of a very dynamic theory: the theory of intertemporal choice. I present the first economic thinking on intertemporal decision-making, and expose how it resulted in Samuelson’s famous discounted utility model; then I describe how and why discounted utility became the standard approach to intertemporal choice in economics through the alleged no...

As the social sciences deal with macrophenomena which are caused by individual human actions, they have to use a theory of human behaviour. They use basically three types of theory: the rational-utilitarian theory, the causalist theory which sees behaviour as caused by social, cultural or biological forces, and the «rational psychology» in Nisbet’s sense. The three theories are important in the...

Despite their distinct objects of study, the human behavioral sciences all include models of individual human behavior. Unity in the behavioral sciences requires that there be a common underlying model of individual human behavior, specialized and enriched to meet the particular needs of each discipline. Such unity does not exist, and cannot be easily attained, since the various disciplines hav...

This paper argues for a closer association between economics and sociology. The latter could benefit from the intellectual rigour of the former. Building a unified socio-economics requires an intellectual rapprochement between the sociologist conception of social interaction and a relaxed version of rational choice. Evolutionary game theory may provide

a) What are the possible values for the rank of A? Why? Solution By the Rank-Nullity Theorem 0 ≤ rank (A) ≤ min{6, 4} = 4. b) What are the possible values for the dimension of the kernel of A? Why? Solution Since dim(image(A)) ≤ 4, by the Rank-Nullity Theorem 2 ≤ dim ker(A) ≤ 6. c) Suppose the rank of A is as large as possible. What is the dimension of ker(A)? Explain. Solution Since then dim(i...