Social science perspectives on climate change and development

University of Copenhagen

Xaquín S. Pérez-Sindín López

Category: Philosophy of social science

  • 🎓 What is university for, really?

    At the start of a course on Social Science Perspectives on Climate Change, I asked students to complete a short questionnaire. The aim was simple: to understand their expectations and, in pedagogical terms, begin establishing a kind of didactic contract for the course. One question was inspired by a debate that has become increasingly visible…

  • Hartmut Rosa’s Lecture: Emotions and Human Agency

    Yesterday I had the chance to attend a lecture by Hartmut Rosa in Copenhagen, invited by the Department of Sociology at the University of Copenhagen. The talk was titled The Atrophy of Discretion: A Plea for Human Agency, and it focused on a question that stayed with me long after the lecture ended: what happens…

  • Economía vs capitalismo, o sobre qué significa “bien común”

    “Aristóteles distinguia dos formas de entender y practicar la economía. Economía, desde la antigua Grecia, es el conjunto de reglas morales con las que gestionamos la casa. Entonces si la ciencia económica se considera a si misma neutral… ni siquiera se acuerda del significado original de la palabra economía, que es el conjunto de reglas…

  • Science and politics in Ulrich Beck (in Spanish)

    Por último, Beck se ocupa del lugar que la ciencia y la política ocupan en la sociedad del riesgo. En ambos casos Beck observa transformaciones institucionales y cognitivas. Bien puede decirse que con el advenimiento de la modernidad, la ciencia suplantó a la religión como la instancia generadora de certidumbres. Sin embargo, y como se mencionó en la primera…

  • Estética

    El término estética (del griego αἰσθητική [aisthetikê], ‘sensación’, ‘percepción’, y este de αἴσθησις [aísthesis], ‘sensación’, ‘sensibilidad’, e -ικά [-icá], ‘relativo a’) tiene diferentes acepciones. En el lenguaje coloquial denota en general lo bello, y en la filosofía tiene diversas definiciones: por un lado es la rama que tiene por objeto el estudio de la esencia…

  • El método científico

    El invento más grande de la humanidad, después del lenguaje, es elmétodo científico. No hay nada que nos haya permitido avanzar tanto como el simple esquema de observar, proponer hipótesis, testarlas y refinarlas hasta poder construir una teoría. Es una receta simple que ya usaban egipcios, griegos y árabes con más o menos acierto, pero…

  • Blogging as analytical aid for team-based research projects

    Research notes have traditionally played an important role in the analysis of data in social science. Apart from transcribing audio-recording, the contextual information serves as a rich source of complementary data. Indeed, various researchers have suggested additional ways of recording supplementary information (Miles and Huberman 1994). These include “interim summaries”, “self-memos”, “and researcher´s diary”. Yet,…

  • Gravitational waves detected or how theory building requires not only empirical evidences but also imagination

    Ligo has detected gravitational waves 100 years after Einstein predicted their existence. In other words, Einstein build up the theory of gravity without having proved the existence of gravitational waves. This fact has reminded me one of his most famous quotations: “Imagination is more important than knowledge”. Imagination understood not as the action of making up…

  • 30 years since challenger accident. Not only social science predictions, but also physical science ones may fail, dramatically

  • The validity of sociological knowledge

    To include epistemological questions concerning the validity of sociological knowledge in the sociology of knowledge is somewhat like trying to push a bus in which one is riding. To be sure, the sociology of knowledge, like all empirical disciplines that accumulate evidence concerning the relativity and determination of human thought, leads towards epistemological questions concerning…