This book is a collection of foundational concepts in the humanities and social sciences and will be of particular use to undergraduate students. This book has been written as a textbook for the interdisciplinary core arts subjects Rethinking Our Humanity and Ideas that Shook the World, and the authors hope that the interdisciplinary nature of these subjects ensures that the book's contents will be useful to any reader who wants to better understand key terms and concepts relevant to human cultures and their history. The reader should note, however, that the terms included in the book have originated from the needs of these two undergraduate subjects, which focus on concepts as they apply to contemporary Australian culture. This means that there are some biases and omissions within this first edition of the book. For instance, the terms within lean heavily towards the Western tradition, and other traditions are more cursorily covered. In subsequent editions of this book, the authors will expand the coverage of other traditions and concepts. The authors have made a conscientious effort to ensure that each definition is concise. Overly complicated language has been avoided for clarity, but terms have not been oversimplified, and scholarly references have been provided for all entries so readers know where to find a more in-depth discussion of the term should they need it. When terms contained within the book are mentioned in another entry, readers can navigate between them using hyperlinks. Every reference cited in the book is also included in the extensive bibliography, which will be a useful resource to readers in and of itself. By including succinct definitions and further resources together, the book acts as a starting point for research that guides students through the process. An impetus for writing this book was that similar volumes often approach terms from a disciplinary perspective. This meant students need to access several resources when researching terms across disciplines. The authors wanted to create an interdisciplinary resource that would allow their students to access concepts across disciplines in the same place. Our hope is that the book will be useful to students as they progress in their studies and even after they have graduated.

The SAGE Handbook of the Philosophy of Social Sciences

, webpage: www.laeuferpaar.de. 1 In our usage, "social science" includes disciplines such as anthropology, political science, and sociology, but also economics and parts of linguistics and psychology. 5 For a more detailed discussion of modeling in the social sciences, see ch. 29 ("Local models versus global theories, and their assessment") of this handbook. For a general review of models in science, see Frigg and Hartmann (2007). 6 See ch. 15 ("Rational choice and its alternatives") of this handbook. 7 See ch. 16 ("Game theory") of this handbook. 8 See ch. 17 ("Evolutionary approaches") of this handbook. 9 See also ch. 18 ("Networks") of this handbook.

2005

Hagle (1995: 7) opines that “functions are valuable to social scientists because most relationships can be modelled in the form of a function.” I would add that functions are valuable for those political scientists who want to make specific theoretical claims and/or use statistics to test the implications of theories of politics. In other words, functions are valuable because they are explicit: they make very specific arguments about relationships. In addition, functions play a key role in developing statistical models.

Biological Theory, 2017

Compiled, updated glossaries from 20 years of teaching social sciences classes.

Hsjsn, 2012

General Knowledge