Advocacy of ‘methodological individualism’ is a widespread, especially among economists. However, the term is rarely defined with adequate precision and some crucial ambiguities are explored in this article. Among these is the commonplace ambivalence over whether explanations should be in terms of individuals alone, or in terms of individuals plus relations between them. It is shown that a grea...

This paper investigates the systemic nature of methodological individualism. According to widespread belief, the notion of autonomy of the actor that is defended by methodological individualism is mistaken because it is incompatible with the study of society in terms of its organized structure. We argue that this viewpoint must be rejected. In our opinion, it stems from confusion between ontolo...

Whitman argues that group selection is consistent with methodological individualism. He begins by defining a weak form of methodological individualism in which agents are not necessarily self-interested or rational and shows that this form of is consistent with Sober and Wilson’s model of group selection. However, Sober and Wilson’s group selection is also consistent with a methodological indiv...

The authors synthesize relevant literature and findings of evaluations of four large-scale, federally funded scientific research programs in the United States to identify desired outcomes of these types of programs, major evaluation challenges, and methodological principles and approaches. Evaluators face numerous contextual, political, and methodological challenges in evaluating big science. T...

In the 20 century there was an unbridgeable gap between the “right” and “left” schools of economics with respect to the determination of value of commodities. While Marxian scholars insisted, that human labour being the essence of value to have a good argument for demonstrating exploitation, mainstream economists in the West focused on marginal utility theory to keeping up their basic axiom of ...

The assessment of methodological quality (MQ) in biomedical research is an area of dynamic development over recent years globally. Understood as a complex and multidimensional construct, several groups have been proposed tools for its evaluation, between them our group has designed and validated scales to assess MQ in therapy, diagnosis and prognosis studies. However, as with other instruments,...

The Development Oriented Triangulation (DOT) framework in this paper can spark and focus the debate about mixed-method approaches in HCI. The framework can be used to classify HCI methods, create mixed-method designs, and to align research activities in multidisciplinary projects. The framework is generic enough to capture the diversity of research within the HCI community, while being specific...

The article provides an overview of ongoing research and key characteristics of Cognitive Semiotics, an emerging field dedicated to the “transdiciplinary study of meaning”, involving above all researchers from semiotics, linguistics, developmental and comparative psychology and philosophy. The combination of the following features distinguish it from other synthetic approaches: (a) integration ...