Instructor: Majid D. Beni
Email: mbeni ‘a’ metu ‘dot’ edu.tr
Course Overview
This graduate-level seminar investigates the formal continuity between natural and social explanatory frameworks, tracing the movement from the logical foundations of induction to the dynamical organisation of social systems. The curriculum first addresses the problem of projectibility and the "New Riddle of Induction", establishing the epistemic basis for non-foundationalist justification. This logic is then extended into the domain of social ontology to adjudicate the tension between holistic structural explanations and causal-interventionist models. Central to this inquiry is the comparative analysis of atomistic, individualist conceptions of the self versus socially embedded accounts, alongside the formal requirements for explaining social phenomena—such as justice—within these varying ontological constraints.
Primary Required Texts
Assessment
Weekly Schedule
Week 1: General Intro.
Week 2: The Formal Constraints of Induction
Week 3: Social Structural Explanation and Mereological Relations
Week 4: Holism vs. Interventionism in the Social Sciences
Week 5: Reflective Equilibrium: Between Coherence and Stability
Week 6: Computational Perspectives on Normative Justification
Week 7: TBA
Week 8: Mid-term Assessment
Week 9: Scale-Invariant Constraints on Adaptive Organisation
Week 10: Process Ontology and the Human Life Cycle
Week 11: Top–Down Constraint and Individual Agency
Week 12: TBA
Week 13: TBA
Week 14: TBA