User:KYPark/1973

Michael Dummett

 * Frege&#58; Philosophy of Language
 * Harvard University Press

Clifford Geertz

 * The Interpretation of Cultures&#58; Selected Essays
 * New York: Basic Books, 1973


 * "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," ibid, 3-30.  In this essay, he explains that he adopted the term "thick description" from philosopher Gilbert Ryle. Ryle pointed out that if someone winks at us without a context, we don't know what it means. It might mean the person is attracted to us, that they are trying to communicate secretly, that they understand what you mean, or anything. As the context changes, the meaning of the wink changes.  Geertz argues that all human behaviour is like this. He therefore distinguishes between a thin description, which (to extend our example) describes only the wink itself, and a thick description, which explains the context of the practices and discourse within a society. According to Geertz, the task of the anthropologist is to give thick descriptions.  In anthropology and other fields, a thick description of a human behaviour is one that explains not just the behaviour, but its context as well, such that the behaviour becomes meaningful to an outsider.

Norman Holland

 * Poems and Persons
 * (1975) 5 Readers Reading
 * (1985) The I
 * (1992) The Critical I
 * Homepage / shorter autobiography

Lauri Karttunen

 * Presuppositions and compound sentences
 * Linguistic Inquiry, 4: 169-93

Robert Merton

 * The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations
 * Edited by Norman W. Storer, including Introduction and Prefatory Notes.
 * University of Chicago Press.
 * http://books.google.com/books?id=zPvcHuUMEMwC

"The exploration of the social conditions that facilitate or retard the search for scientific knowledge has been the major theme of Robert K. Merton's work for forty years. This collection of papers [is] a fascinating overview of this sustained inquiry .... There are very few other books in sociology ... with such meticulous scholarship, or so elegant a style. This collection of papers is, and is likely to remain for a long time, one of the most important books in sociology." -- Joseph Ben-David, New York Times Book Review.

Since the emergence of the Mertonian paradigm in the early 1960s, most research in the field appears to fit Kuhn's definition of "normal science." Not only Merton's own work but that of many others in the field have focused primarily on problems which, once elucidated, turn out to be directly relevant to questions explicit or implicit in the paradigm. In short, the sociology of science has matured to the point where much research involves "puzzle-solving." As Kuhn emphasizes, to describe research as "puzzle-solving" does not imply that it falls short of being imaginative, satisfying, or important. Filling out the areas which a paradigm can only identify -- what Merton has described as "specified ignorance" -- is as necessary to the development of scientific knowledge as is the scientific revolution; without the yin of normal science, there would be no basis for the yang of scientific revolution -- and the latter is comparatively rare. (p. xxx)

Hayden White

 * Metahistory&#58; The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe
 * The Johns Hopkins University Press

Ernst Schumacher

 * Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered
 * ``a collection of essays that brought Schumacher's ideas to a wider audience, at a critical time in history. It was released soon after the effects of the 1973 energy crisis shook the world and dealt with the crisis and various emerging trends (such as globalization) in an unusual fashion.``
 * ``Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful.``