This book examines a range of critical concepts that are central to a shift in the social sciences toward "pragmatic inquiry," reflecting a twenty-first century concern with particular problems and themes rather than grand theory. Taking a transnational and transdisciplinary approach, the collection demonstrates a shared commitment to using analytical concepts for empirical exploration and a general orientation to research that favors an attention to objects, techniques, and practices. The chapters draw from broad-based and far-reaching social theory in order to analyze new, specific challenges, from grasping the everyday workings of markets, courtrooms, and clinics, to inscribing the transformations of practice within research disciplines themselves. Each contributor takes a key concept and then explores its genealogies and its circulations across scholarly communities, as well as its proven payoffs for the social sciences and, often, critical reflections on its present and future uses. This carefully crafted volume will significantly expand and improve the analytical repertoires or toolkits available to social scientists, including scholars in sociology or anthropology and those working in science and technology studies, public health, and related fields.

Written with the needs of students uppermost, Small-Scale Research is a direct, comprehensive guide for students doing theses, dissertations, papers and projects. It systematically works through the central methods of inquiry and demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches.

A ground-breaking study of one of America's greatest philosophers

This book examines the ways in which religious communities experimentally engage the world and function as fallible inquisitive agents, despite frequent protests to the contrary. Using the philosophy of inquiry and semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, it develops unique naturalist conceptions of religious meaning and ultimate orientation while also arguing for a reappraisal of the ways in which the world’s venerable religious traditions enable novel forms of communal inquiry into what Peirce termed “vital matters.” Pragmatic inquiry, it argues, is a ubiquitous and continuous phenomenon. Thus, religious participation, though cautiously conservative in many ways, is best understood as a variety of inhabited experimentation. Religious communities embody historically mediated hypotheses about how best to engage the world and curate networks of semiotic resources for rendering those engagements meaningful. Religions best fulfill their inquisitive function when they both deploy and reform their sign systems as they learn better to engage reality.

Most contemporary philosophers would call themselves naturalists, yet there is little consensus on what naturalism entails. Long signifying the notion that science should inform philosophy, debates over naturalism often hinge on how broadly or narrowly the terms nature and science are defined. The founding figures of American Pragmatism—C. S. Peirce (1839–1914), William James (1842–1910), and John Dewey (1859–1952)—developed a distinctive variety of naturalism by rejecting reductive materialism and instead emphasizing social practices. Owing to this philosophical lineage, pragmatism has made original and insightful contributions to the study of religion as well as to political theory. In Pragmatism and Naturalism, distinguished scholars examine pragmatism’s distinctive form of nonreductive naturalism and consider its merits for the study of religion, democratic theory, and as a general philosophical orientation. Nancy Frankenberry, Philip Kitcher, Wayne Proudfoot, Jeffrey Stout, and others evaluate the contribution pragmatism can make to a viable naturalism, explore what distinguishes pragmatic naturalism from other naturalisms on offer, and address the pertinence of pragmatic naturalism to methodological issues in the study of religion. In parts dedicated to historical pragmatists, pragmatism in the philosophy and the study of religion, and pragmatism and democracy, they display the enduring power and contemporary relevance of pragmatic naturalism.

This volume presents a series of essays on the nature of intellectual inquiry: what its aims are and how it operates. Isaac Levi draws upon the work of the American Pragmatists C. S. Peirce and John Dewey to investigate what justifies change in belief.

Pragmatist thought is central to sociology. However, sociologists typically encounter pragmatism indirectly, as a philosophy of science or as an influence on canonical social scientists, rather than as a vital source of theory, research questions, and methodological reflection in sociology today. In The New Pragmatist Sociology, Neil Gross, Isaac Ariail Reed, and Christopher Winship assemble a range of sociologists to address essential ideas in the field and their historical and theoretical connection to classical pragmatism. The book examines questions of methodology, social interaction, and politics across the broad themes of inquiry, agency, and democracy. Essays engage widely and deeply with topics that motivate both pragmatist philosophy and sociology, including rationality, speech, truth, expertise, and methodological pluralism. Contributors include Natalie Aviles, Karida Brown, Daniel Cefaï, Mazen Elfakhani, Luis Flores, Daniel Huebner, Cayce C. Hughes, Paul Lichterman, John Levi Martin, Ann Mische, Vontrese D. Pamphile, Jeffrey N. Parker, Susan Sibley, Daniel Silver, Mario Small, Iddo Tavory, Stefan Timmermans, Luna White, and Joshua Whitford.

Making the case for a pragmatist approach to social inquiry and knowledge production, sixteen contributors illustrate the power of pragmatism to inform democratic, community-centred, action-oriented research.

Critical Pragmatics develops three ideas: language is a way of doing things with words; meanings of phrases and contents of utterances derive ultimately from human intentions; and language combines with other factors to allow humans to achieve communicative goals. In this book, Kepa Korta and John Perry explain why critical pragmatics provides a coherent picture of how parts of language study fit together within the broader picture of human thought and action. They focus on issues about singular reference, that is, talk about particular things, places or people, which have played a central role in the philosophy of language for more than a century. They argue that attention to the 'reflexive' or 'utterance-bound' contents of utterances sheds new light on these old problems. Their important study proposes a new approach to pragmatics and should be of wide interest to philosophers of language and linguists.

′This book is a milestone in the coaching literature. Elaine Cox provides an excellent text that is scholarly, practical and accessible. She offers clear insights into how coaching works so that coaching is truly understood!′ - Bob Garvey, Professor of Business Education, York St John Business School ′The development of the coaching literature has often been protracted and modest. In recent years, few coaching texts provided a significant leap forward in our understanding of psychological dynamics of coaching. For this reason, Cox’s Coaching Understood is a game changer. More thoroughly and systematically than ever before, this work gets under the bonnet of the coaching engine and explores the mechanics of the coaching process. For anyone wondering why coaching works, this book is your answer.′ - Yossi Ives, Tag International Development, UK (International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching Mentoring) Coaching Understood takes a fresh approach to coaching skills and techniques by examining each element of the coaching process in detail in order to verify and justify its effectiveness. By exposing the mystery underlying coaching′s success as a personal and professional development intervention, Elaine Cox undertakes to generate a better understanding of coaching, improve coaching practice, and breed a new generation of more informed coachees and buyers of coaching. Coaching Understood is essential reading for students and practitioners alike.