La première édition de cet ouvrage, en 1988, s’était faite dans un contexte où les méthodes d’analyse et de mesure de la mobilité spatiale connaissaient un important regain d’intérêt, notamment de la part des gouvernements. L’urbanisation et les changements dans la répartition spatiale des populations, ainsi que leur incidence sur les structures économiques et sociales nécessitaient en effet des outils d’analyse adaptés. Enrichie d’une nouvelle présentation, la réédition du manuel s’imposa...

This book addresses the challenge of understanding human life. It compares our life experience with the attempts to grasp it by astrologers, eugenicists, psychologists, neuroscientists, social scientists, and philosophers. The main opposition among these specialties lies between understanding and misunderstanding. The book also addresses the central methodological difficulty of capturing a human life.It is first examined how certain approaches may lead to a misunderstanding of huma...

This work examines in depth the methodological relationships that probability and statistics have maintained with the social sciences from their emergence. It covers both the history of thought and current methods.First it examines in detail the history of the different paradigms and axioms for probability, from their emergence in the seventeenth century up to the most recent developments of the three major concepts: objective, subjective and logicist probability. It shows the stat...

This book examines methods for linking osteo-archaeological data with historical and environmental sources to shed light on the living conditions of past populations. Covering all time periods from prehistory to the 20th century, it aims to construct models that capture plausible demographic dynamics from highly fragmentary evidence.Starting from the known in order to explore the unknown, this book presents a historical view of methods used in the past and present as well as propos...

This open access book examines the methodological complications of using complexity science concepts within the social science domain. The opening chapters take the reader on a tour through the development of simulation methodologies in the fields of artificial life and population biology, then demonstrates the growing popularity and relevance of these methods in the social sciences. Following an in-depth analysis of the potential impact of these methods on social science and social theory...