The Argument If society is not an organism, why do its parts—people and groups of people—tend to act in regular and predictable ways? A long line of social theorists have argued that regularity is due to a general process whereby the fluidity of social relations can crystallize into definite structures that then confront further interaction as objective social facts. In Chapter 1 I propose that...

The purpose of this White Paper of the EU Support Action “Visioneer”(see www.visioneer.ethz.ch) is to address the following goals: 1. Develop strategies to quickly increase the objective knowledge about social and economic systems 2. Describe requirements for efficient large-scale scientific data mining of anonymized social and economic data 3. Formulate strategies how to collect stylized facts...

This paper is a critical review of Robert Putnam’s influential analysis of social capital in America: Bowling Alone. The review argues that Bowling Alone reflects many of the strengths and weaknesses of the social capital literature. Like this literature, Bowling Alone describes a remarkable number of facts concerning community life in America. At the same time, the book suffers from many of th...

Abstract The semantic inferentialist account of the social institution meaning can be naturally extended to for ontology. I argue here that inferentialism provides a framework within which mathematical ontology understood as ontology, and facts socially instituted facts. further resources underpin at least some aspects objectivity mathematics, even when truth claims is instituted.

The purpose of this White Paper of the EU Support Action “Visioneer”(see www.visioneer.ethz.ch) is to address the following goals: 1. Develop strategies to quickly increase the objective knowledge about social and economic systems 2. Describe requirements for efficient large-scale scientific data mining of anonymized social and economic data 3. Formulate strategies how to collect stylized facts...

The paper presents how the Random PROLOG Processor (RPP), a bio-inspired model of computations, can be used for formalization and analysis of a phenomenon the Collective Intelligence (CI) of social structures. The RPP originates from the question of why inference processes are quasi-chaotic in real life. In the RPP, clause_molecules (CMs) move quasi-randomly around in abstract Computational_PRO...

This Chapter summarizes some of the well known stigmergic computational techniques inspired by nature, mainly for optimization problems developed by mimicking social insects’ behavior. Some facts about social insects namely ants, bees and termites are presented with an emphasis on how they could interact and self organize for solving real world problems. We focused on ant colony optimization al...

That thought experiments (TEs) are widely used across the sciences and social sciences poses a riddle for those who think that we can learn new facts only through observation and experimentation. The riddle can be expressed by the following dilemma. Either the TE provides genuine knowledge of new facts. But this would conflict with deeply held views about the sources of our knowledge and make i...