global health research is essentially a normative undertaking: we use it to propose policies that ought to be implemented. to arrive at a normative conclusion in a logical way requires at least one normative premise, one that cannot be derived from empirical evidence alone. but there is no widely accepted normative premise for global health, and the actors with the power to set policies may use...

On the other hand, to justify any profession as scientific, there is a need for such laws or fundamentals, besides a recognized body of knowledge. This calls for a controversial question “Are social sciences scientific?” Most of the popular literature on social sciences research have either grossly underrepresented the laws of social world or have totally ignored the mention of such laws. Somet...

The objective of the article was to broach the problem of integration between epidemiology and human and social sciences, within the context of integration of the sciences. Before the emergence of modern medicine, epidemiology held a worldview that conceived of health and disease processes as integrated with their geographic, historical, economic and social aspects. The dissociation that marked...

While numerous computational techniques have been developed for analyzing patterns of social media use, less work has explored incorporating such techniques into tools designed for social media users. Here, we argue for the value of such tools, particularly in the context of political discussion. Rather than being used for abstract analysis, these tools can draw attention to computationally ide...

In this workshop paper we describe a preliminary study of collaboration practices among social scientists. Based on interviews with 10 social science researchers we describe how they rely on local networks as well as very tight-knit international communities. Their technology use differed according to need and particularly opportunity. Author

The study of social relationships lies at the heart of the social sciences, but our understanding of the cognitive structures that support them has received little attention. This paper develops an account of the form and content of these structures, arguing that social relationships are represented by a small number of categories, rather than by dimensions as proposed by others. Taxometric ana...

Working class conservatism is a perennial issue in social science, but researchers have struggled to provide an adequate characterization. In social psychology, the question has too often been framed in 'either/or' terms of whether the disadvantaged are more or less likely to support the status quo than the advantaged. This is a crude rendering of the issue obscuring the fact that even if most ...

Envisioning real utopias is a central component of a broader intellectual enterprise that can be called emancipatory social science. Emancipatory social science seeks to generate scientifi c knowledge relevant to the collective project of challenging various forms of human oppression. To call this a form of social science, rather than simply social criticism or social philosophy, recognizes the...

How do journalists mark quoted content as certain or uncertain, and how do readers interpret these signals? Predicates such as thinks, claims, and admits offer a range of options for framing quoted content according to the author’s own perceptions of its credibility. We gather a new dataset of direct and indirect quotes from Twitter, and obtain annotations of the perceived certainty of the quot...