John Goldthorpe is one of Britain’s most eminent sociologists and a strong advocate of quantitative sociology. In this concise and accessible book, he provides a new rationale for recent developments in sociology which focus on establishing and explaining probabilistic regularities in human populations. Through these developments, Goldthorpe shows how sociology has become more securely placed w...

U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s comments on space exploration, told me that the ultimate goal of any medical researcher was “to touch the face of God”.1 When pushed for clarification, he asserted that science – neuroscience in particular – is a utopian pursuit (free from the foibles and fallacies that normally plague people), whose practitioners (i.e. scientists) must altruistically strive to ma...

Sociology and philosophy seem to have this in common: in spite of notable progress in special fields, the discipline as a whole lacks unity and fails to accumulate knowledge. Both disciplines are split into separate schools between which there exist no clearly defined relations and no notable increase of insight. Thus after an auspicious beginning Pitirim Sorokin’s (1927, 1942, 1947) attempt to...

Digital Preservation is a domain within ICT, that is mainly based on empirical knowledge. One way to introduce theoretical fundamentals is to study accumulated experience and best practices, and expose a common framework from them. In this paper, an idea of having metrics as common objective assessment of capabilities of tools, environments and processes is described. The goal is to have DP wel...

The relationship between psychology and phenomenology is not one that is easily traceable (for a discussion on the difficulties of this see, e.g., Graumann 1991). One of the reasons for this opaque matter is that neither psychology nor phenomenology can be defined as one subject area. Both have developed over time with different persons representing varying approaches and others yet again furth...

Reviewed by Christopher Lawrence, M.B., Ch.B., M.Sc., Medical Historian to the Wellcome Museum at the Science Museum, London SW7 2DD. Though he makes no reference to it, Professor Kneller's theory of the origin of scientific knowledge and its change in time is almost identical to that found in Adam Smith's essay on the history of astronomy published in 1795. It is a theory based on the concept ...

Because of advances in methods and theory, archaeology now addresses issues central to debates in the social sciences in a far more sophisticated manner than ever before. Coupled with methodological innovations, multiscalar archaeological studies around the world have produced a wealth of new data that provide a unique perspective on long-term changes in human societies, as they document variat...