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Record W2074830437 · doi:10.1177/000312240907400302

A Pragmatist Theory of Social Mechanisms

2009· article· en· W2074830437 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueAmerican Sociological Review · 2009
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicContemporary Sociological Theory and Practice
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British Columbia
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPragmatismEpistemologySociologyAction (physics)Sociological theorySocial theoryMechanism (biology)Social sciencePositive economicsPhilosophyEconomics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Some sociologists have recently argued that a major aim of sociological inquiry is to identify the mechanisms by which cause and effect relationships in the social world come about. This article argues that existing accounts of social mechanisms are problematic because they rest on either inadequately developed or questionable understandings of social action. Building on an insight increasingly common among sociological theorists—that action should be conceptualized in terms of social practices—I mobilize ideas from the tradition of classical American pragmatism to develop a more adequate theory of mechanisms. I identify three kinds of analytical problems the theory is especially well poised to address and then lay out an agenda for future research.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.006
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.005
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.926
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0060.005
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.002
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.065
GPT teacher head0.405
Teacher spread0.339 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it