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Title: Fuzzy-Set Social Science
ISBN: 0226702774
Author:
Charles C. Ragin
Publicate Date: 2000-08-01
Publish: 2000-08-01
List Price: $25.00
Average Customer Rating: 3.5
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $18.80
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $16.50
Amazon Merchant Price: $22.50
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| Customer Review: |
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1: This book is a great first step in reorienting social science
Where to start? Well, first the second reviewer is off the mark with the critique about the specificity regarding the IMF. This is not a book about the IMF, so the lack of exhaustive it not a fatal flaw. What this book attempt to accomplish is to get one to think about new ways of categorizing social phenomena. Too much of quantitative method assumes that one can make clear distinctions between categories. This is stating the case much too strongly to reflect reality in an acceptable manner. What Ragin does is offer some theorizing about how one can recognize the fuzzy-boundaries of social phenomena. His insight rests on the use of key characteristics to provide the metric for those who will try to better reflect social events in their research. If you wish to create a better explanation of what you are studying then purchase this book. It is sure to improve your research and how you theorize about the objects you study.
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2: Fuzzy subjectivity
I find crisp sets problematic. Hoping to resolve some of the problems (for qualitative and comparative research) of crisp sets, I turned to this text. Ragin repeats himself time and time again in this text. Some complex topics (concentration, dilation, complex theoretical statements) receive minimal attention, leaving readers out in the cold. He fails to establish the efficacy of fuzzy sets for sufficiency or necessity. Ragin also fails to support why necessity is either valuable or possible in social sciences. I would seek to argue that necessity is virtually impossible to determine in social sciences. J.S. Mill was no sociologist. Also, when Ragin attempts to illustrate the application of fuzzy-set methods to IMF protests (chapter 10), he seems to neglect to include certain steps in the calculation of membership scores in the set with severe IMF protests. Ragin does not provide enough qualitative data to support why each country was indicated to have membership in his seven levels of IMF protest membership (p. 265). Also, when Ragin discusses assessment of fuzzy set membership (p. 165 - 171), I feel that fuzzy set membership assignment provides too much flexibility to individual researchers that severely hampers retestability (or even critical analysis) of the data. Ragin skirts the issue of researcher subjectivity when he makes statements like (p. 166, and similar statements in other portions of the text): "The steps I sketch here assume that researchers have a solid understanding of the concepts appearing in their theories and that they have an extensive base of relevant substantive knowledge as well." I certainly feel that the 'crisp-set approach' can be highly problematic, but Ragin's fuzzy-set approach does not seem to be a well-formulated answer to social scientific quandrys presented by crisp sets.
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3: useful place to start but by no means the final story
There are two aspects to Ragin's book. The first part of the book is really an update of his general methodological program first set forth in The Comparative Method. It does add some new things to the older material and is thus worth the look. Ragin has some important points to make and deserves to be paid careful attention by social scientists of both qualitative and quantitative traditions. The second part is a relatively gentle--too gentle in my view--introduction to fuzzy set theory as well as to some applications to social scientific problems that can be addressed with FST. This is useful since it won't put readers off with lots of heavy math they're unlikely to understand. However, the presentation of FST in this book is weak. IMO the worst deficiency is that it lacks cites to more detailed literature that would be necessary for anyone who wanted to apply FST to real problems. Read this but you really need to see Michael Smithson's alas now quite rare Fuzzy Set Analysis for Behavioral and Social Sciences... which isn't cited in Ragin.
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