Understanding Society: ChatGPT makes stuff up
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Rawls believes that a just society must be a pluralistic society, and that means that it must be neutral across (reasonable) comprehensive conceptions of the good. Citizens must be enabled to pursue their own comprehensive conceptions without interference from the state. Does this imply that a comprehensive conception based on the idea of ethnic or racial superiority over another must be condoned? It does not, because Rawls is not in fact neutral across all comprehensive conceptions. He belie...| Understanding Society
In his speech to the top officers of the United States military Donald Trump has crossed the line from reckless right-wing authoritarian politician to aspiring fascist dictator. Here is a report from the Washington Post on the unprecedented event; scroll down to Amy Wang’s coverage of his speech. Here are some crucial excerpts from her reporting.| Understanding Society
A prior post asked whether liberal political philosophy can be “anti-racist”. Charles Mills addresses a related question in much more radical terms. He offers a fundamental critique of European/American liberal philosophy grounded in his view that the “social contract” tradition embodies a comprehensive “racial contract” that embodies racial hierarchy and white supremacy. Here is Mills’s critical overview of the social contract tradition from Hobbes to Rawls:The social contrac...| Understanding Society
John Rawls and Philip Pettit agree about the idea that a liberal democracy depends on the idea that all citizens have equal liberties, rights, worth, and dignity. Therefore they also agree that social and legal arrangements that are incompatible with equal rights, equal liberties, and equal dignity are illegitimate. They disagree in some details about what all of this means — Pettit refers to liberty as “the absence of domination” (link), while Rawls emphasizes the liberty to pursue o...| Understanding Society
We might say that a political philosophy is a formulation of the normative ideals that the philosopher holds to be primary in implementing the moral and social facts of “assemblages of free individuals in society, with conflicts of interest and belief”. How should such a society be organized? What values should it aspire to realize through its laws and practices? What forms of constitution, law, and state are best for the realization of the individuals who live within the society?| Understanding Society
Many thoughtful people in the US are concerned about the effects that the 2025 federal budget reconciliation law will have on poor people in many states who are currently enrolled in Medicaid health coverage. KFF has put together a comprehensive analysis of the implications of this omnibus act for Medicaid patients here. I asked Gemini for a summary of the impact this massive change in Medicaid will have, with over $1 trillion reductions in Medicaid spending over the coming ten years(!). H...| Understanding Society
A current exhibition of the paintings of Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) at the Art Institute in Chicago is quite remarkable. It demonstrates the eye, the hand, and the sensibility of this great late-Impressionist painter. But the exhibition is remarkable in another way as well: there is almost no evidence in the paintings on exhibit, or the curatorial texts that support the exhibition, that conveys the intense and prolonged social, political, and military conflict of the period from the late...| Understanding Society
Chicago is a highly diverse city, and it is a good example of life in a multicultural democracy. The image above is a photo of the crowd on Navy Pier on a recent Saturday summer evening. According to local estimates, as many as 120,000 people visit Navy Pier on a Saturday night, and it is a good practical example of the benefits of multicultural democracy. The crowd is highly diverse, with adults and children from all racial groups and many ethnicities and language groups. And there is a subs...| Understanding Society
Science proceeds through research communities whose participants share important and often distinctive features of thought and method. This is one of the key insights of the “historical turn” in the philosophy of science initiated in the 1970s (link, link), and it underlies much work within the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies. But what more specifically goes into the “denkkollectiv” (Ludwik Fleck), “research programme” (Imre Lakatos), or “disciplinary m...| Understanding Society
Historical research may seem to be a field in which AI tools will be especially useful. Historians are often confronted with very large unstructured digital collections of documents, letters, images, treaties, legal settlements, contracts, and diplomatic exchanges that far exceed the ability of a single human researcher to sift and analyze for valuable historical insights. Can emerging tools in the AI revolution help to make systematic use of such historical collections?Earlier applications o...| Understanding Society
A prior post made an effort to gain greater analytical clarity concerning the unfairness involved in the separation between the “one percent” economy and the rest of us. In what ways is the wealth owned by the super-billionaires an “unfair” extraction from the rest of US society? How can we account for the very rapid accumulation of wealth in the hands of the richest 1 percent of US wealth holders since 1980? The answer seems to largely turn on the rapid expansion in wealth represen...| Understanding Society
Much thinking about economic justice for working people has been framed by the nineteenth-century concept of “capitalism”: owners of enterprises constitute a minority of the population; they hire workers who represent the majority of the population; wages and profits define the distribution of income throughout the whole population. This picture still works well enough for a range of economic activities in the advanced capitalist economies when it comes to manufacturing, agriculture, and ...| Understanding Society
Philip Pettit’s writings about republicanism offer a valuable and distinctive perspective on individual freedom and the nature of a good society. He develops those ideas most fully in Republicanism : a theory of freedom and government. Pettit’s core idea is that we should conceive of freedom as “non-domination” — that is, that an individual is free when he or she is not subject to the arbitrary power of other individuals, groups, or institutions. He emphasizes that non-domination i...| Understanding Society
In his influential article "A definition of physicalism" (1993) Philip Pettit attempts to formulate a consistent and coherent account of physicalism as an ontology of the world.I believe that we can define a possibly true, substantive doctrine which holds, roughly, that the empirical world 'contains just what a true complete physics would say it contains'. (213)| Understanding Society
The current war on DEI has proven to be unrelenting and highly destructive to the independence, academic freedom, and inclusiveness of American universities. And yet the values that gave rise to DEI initiatives throughout the country in the past two decades are deeply grounded in fundamental American values of equality, freedom, and community. How did we get to the place where DEI is regarded as extremist and alien?First, some background. DEI is a slogan; it stands for Diversity, Equity, and ...| Understanding Society
In previous posts I've been fairly skeptical about the value of ChatGPT as a research tool (link). In recent weeks I've been exploring Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash and Gemini Deep Research, and I'm cautiously more impressed. There are two core shortcomings of an AI tool based solely on large language models and massive training: lack of specific sources of factual knowledge and inability to provide references or sources for the statements the chatbot makes. The Gemini products address both probl...| Understanding Society
source: https://www.kff.org/key-data-on-health-and-health-care-by-race-and-ethnicity/?entry=health-status-and-outcomes-birth-risks-and-outcomesThe rightwing extremist war on DEI intensifies by the week, it appears. And the scope of its prohibitions expands as well. Universities throughout the United States are being bullied through the threat of the loss of Federal funds -- sometimes in the billions -- unless all traces of DEI programs, offices, webpages, and staff are erased. But recall what...| Understanding Society
My current book Rethinking Analytical Sociology has now appeared in print. The book is intended to provide a sympathetic but critical review of analytical sociology as a relatively new sub-discipline within sociology. Here is a video preview of the book.| Understanding Society
Many universities have witnessed a decline in students pursuing majors in the humanities, including English literature. Why has this happened? | Understanding Society
There is sometimes an inclination within the social sciences to unify and "improve" the methodologies of the social sciences to allow them to be "fully scientific" in the way that chemistry or physics were thought to be in the neo-positivist phase of the philosophy of science. With something like these ambitions Klarita Gërxhani, Nan D. de Graaf, and Werner Raub's recent Handbook of Sociological Science: Contributions to Rigorous Sociology (2022) purports to be a "handbook for rigorous soci...| Understanding Society
Quantitative social scientists have something of a catechism when it comes to providing evidence for causal assertions. If we want to assert that A is a contributing cause to B (for example, living in a neighborhood with many sub-standard housing units is a cause of higher rates of delinquency), we need to conduct a study involving a reasonably large number of cases and then assess whether cases with high-A values are also found to have high B-values. And in order to avoid well-known problems...| Understanding Society
Derek Parfit hit the philosophy firmament in the early 1960s, while Karl Popper arrived on the Vienna scene three decades earlier. David Edmonds' biography of Parfit provides a careful and detailed account of Parfit's main philosophical preoccupations and some details about his life in Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality. Popper's autobiographical essay in Paul Arthur Schilpp, The Philosophy of Karl PopperPart I and Part II (published separately as An Unended Quest) offers ...| Understanding Society
A defining component of Eric Hobsbawm’s historical writings is the quartet of “Age” books:Age of Revolution,Age of Capital,Age of Empire, andAge of Extremes. These are synthetic works, offering a narrative of the long nineteenth century and the short twentieth century. They give primary attention to developments pertaining to economic, political, and social change in Britain, Europe, and North America, with occasional commentary on the rest of the world (Asia, Africa, and South America)...| Understanding Society
E. P. Thompson was one of the great social historians of the twentieth century (link, link). He was also a committed socialist from youth to the end of his life. His 1963 book, The Making of the English Working Class, transformed the way that historians on the left conceptualized “social class”, and it was one of the formative works of "history from below". Thompson was a member of the British Communist Party (CPGB) until 1956, following the Soviet invasion of Hungary and Nikita Khrushche...| Understanding Society
The "historical turn" in the philosophy of science in the 1960s and 1970s gave most of its attention to the development of the physical sciences -- especially physics itself. (See Tom Nickles' essay "Historicist Theories of Scientific Rationality" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for a detailed account of this development in the philosophy of science; link.) Historian-philosophers like Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn, and Imre Lakatos studied the development of astronomy, physics, and che...| Understanding Society
