So, a reader asked for recommendations for works on the philosophy of the social sciences, and I have few enough readers that I suppose I should humor them. Sadly, I don't know exactly what to recommend, which is another reason for posting on the topic; perhaps some of my other tiny handful of readers will have suggestions. I've read a bit of classic stuff, such as Neurath's writings on the philosophy of social science. Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is on my to-read list, though the last time I tried to read it I couldn't get past the introduction, which gives Eurocentrism a bad name (I'm not one of those "Western civilization is evil" types, of course; I'm a great fan of Western science, for example. But Weber's enthusiasm for all things Western is positively embarrassing. He goes so far as to praise European theology as being superior to that to be found in India or the far East. Skeptical though I am of the value of being advanced in theology, I recognize that it is an area where there's such a thing as being more or less sophisticated, and I'm sorry, this isn't a contest Europe wins. His praise of Western logic is also questionable; I think it is only with Frege that we clearly pull ahead in that area, and Weber was quite obviously not familiar with Frege. Weber seemed to think Aristotelian logic was superior to the logic done in, say, India, which it quite simply wasn't).
However, the social sciences have of course changed greatly since the time of Neurath, and certainly since the time of Weber, and I don't know what current stuff is especially worth reading; nothing I've read has particularly stood out. Perhaps I will have more to say shortly, though, as I'm reading a lot about sociobiology at the moment. At least by the time I've struggled through some of the literature about that I may have some things to recommend against (besides Richard Miller, who was discussed in a few recent blog posts).
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