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jaydeedubyu.bsky.social
@jaydeedubyu.bsky.social
68 followers 260 following 18 posts
Sociology, political economy, industrial policy, pragmatism
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jaydeedubyu.bsky.social
There's a 1967 Candid Camera where the principal tells teachers the students will grade the teachers, including on their "inspirational qualities". Teachers reactions are impressive.... a clip:
December 1, 2025 at 1:30 AM
jaydeedubyu.bsky.social
We can and should of course turn to data “as tests of any idea or hypothesis that suggests itself.” But, as every honest researcher knows, it is no simple thing to confirm or disconfirm, and, as often as not, our first real discoveries are often just that we had not actually managed to “delimit the problem sufficiently to indicate what kind of solution is relevant.”77 We see in Watts—and in Turco and Zuckerman, too—some respect for the ideal-typical, if stylized, story of the scientific division of labor we all learn in elementary school, the one with Newton, an apple, and the principle of gravitation on the side of Verstehen, and some equations and predictions that we can test with experiments giving us our Erklären. For pragmatists, by contrast, this stylized story is misleading in even the most scientific of fields. We do not need to (nor should we) eschew our search for systematic social regularities, but we cannot forget that all inquiry amounts in practice to the “progressive determination of a problem and its possible solutions.”.
March 5, 2025 at 6:32 PM
jaydeedubyu.bsky.social
This idea, that causal inquiry never stands alone from Verstehen, whether in the generation or the evaluation of our hypotheses, should recall Duneier’s crack— in response to Wacquant—that “sociology is constantly criticized for documenting the ‘obvious’ when, in fact, there is more than one obvious.”73 But it gets there differently and to different effect than Watts’s own riff on this same problem, which he expresses as the claim that explanations we think are obvious “once we know the answer” have some tendency to beguile us into “thinking that we know more than we do.”74 Pragmatism, in its self-conception at least, is more worried even than Watts about what Dewey called the “cultural waste, confusion and distortion” that results from our failure to put what we think we know to practical test, by relegating “scientific (that is, competent) methods of inquiry to a specialized technical field.”75 But Dewey’s recognition that inquiry, in experience, is the progressive determination of a problem and its possible solutions led him to take seriously that “the first propositions we make as means of resolving a problem of any marked degree of difficulty are indeed likely to be too vague and coarse to be effective, just as in the story of invention of other instrumentalities, the first forms are relatively clumsy, uneconomical, and ineffective.”
March 5, 2025 at 6:32 PM
jaydeedubyu.bsky.social
180 -
As the problem progressively assumes definite shape by means of repeated acts of observation, possible solutions suggest themselves. These possible solutions are, truistically (in terms of the theory), possible meanings of the data determined in observation. The process of reasoning is an elaboration of them. When they are checked by reference to observed materials, they constitute the subject-matter of inferential propositions. The latter are means of attaining the goal of knowledge as warranted assertion, not instances or examples of knowledge. They are also operational in nature since they institute new experimental observations whose subject-matter provides both tests for old hypotheses and starting-points for new ones or at least for modifying solutions previously entertained. And so on until a determinate situation is instituted.
March 5, 2025 at 6:17 PM
jaydeedubyu.bsky.social
!!!

Notable too: Funders include "the NIH/NCI (1R37CA279822-01) and the Yale Cancer Center (supported by NIH/NCI research grant P30CA016359). E.B. received support from the Dana-Farber Cancer Immunology Training Program (NIH T32CA207021)."
February 26, 2025 at 7:18 PM