A question about the philosophy of social science

LOVEthroughINTELLECT · Nov 19, 2005

Of all of the branches of philosophy, the questions and problems in the philosophy of social science probably interest me the most.

Let's assume for a moment that the social sciences are not really science. What then is the status of the social sciences?

Are they pseudo-disciplines that exist only to give unneeded jobs in academia to those who reject the humanities but aren't good enough for science? And/or are they pseudo-disciplines that exist only to meet the demands on the higher education industry to award a degree to as many people as possible (a result of credentialism?) ?

The problem with the academia explanations above, it seems, is that the methods and theories of the social sciences don't merely exist in formal higher education. Business and non-academic government practice social science as much as academia (market research is a good example).

Or are the social sciences genuinely motivated by curiosity and the need to solve problems as much as the natural sciences? In other words, are they bona fide disciplined rational inquiry?

If the social sciences aren't science but are genuine intellectual pursuit, how are they different from the humanities? Are they just the humanities in a lab coat? Are they just the humanities with math? Or are there fundamental differences between the social sciences and the humanities that make them distinct traditions?

If the social sciences aren't really science then how reliable are they?

I could think of other questions, but we already have plenty to get us started.

FreezBee · Nov 19, 2005

LOVEthroughINTELLECT said:
I could think of other questions, but we already have plenty to get us started.

But let's get started then!

There's a philosopher Peter Winch who's written the book The Idea of a Social Science - you can about Peter Winch at this page:

http://www.uea.ac.uk/~j339/Peter_Winch.htm

Winchs philosophical reputation is mostly due to his famous (or infamous) monograph, The Idea of a Social Science (1958, 1990). This is perhaps the most influential of the little red books published by followers of Wittgenstein which briefly held the English-speaking philosophical world in the late 50s and early 60s. However, unlike others of the little red books, Winchs was read widely outside academic philosophy.

Winchs aim in this book was to follow Collingwoods aim, in his classic work The Idea of History, of attempting to understand human action as from the inside, as the action of people with ideas, agents, not merely related to each other externally as billiard balls are. Winch urged that any philosophy or social science which failed so to understand human action was not succeeding in understanding human action action with an inevitably social dimension -- at all. However, while Collingwood saw the study of history as by and large a successful effort to understand, Winch excoriated the social sciences for treating human beings as if they were physical objects or some other fit matter for scientific treatment. Winch famously claimed that most of sociology was in truth not any kind of science, but a disguised form of philosophy. His book might easily have been entitled, The very idea of a social science.

Usually social science refers to something with the use of statistics - looking at people in particular roles.

Winch's idea was to look at the human behind the statistics - the whole human, not just a particular role.

So, it's a bit different, what answer you'll get, dependent on who you ask.

Maybe that's one of the problems. We can't really examine humans the same way as sticks and stones.

Ok, that was my 2 cents.

cheers

- FreezBee

LOVEthroughINTELLECT · Nov 20, 2005

Someone once said to me that Geology is just a philosophy.

A case could be made, it seems, that the natural sciences are a disguised form of philosophy as well.

But there does seem to be a fundamental difference between philosophy and science--a difference that the social sciences also have. The difference is that philosophers just work with thoughts and words. You could have no eyesight, no hearing, no sense of smell, no sense of taste and no sense of touch and still practice philosophy. Science, on the other hand, uses the senses to make observations and take measurements.

The social sciences have at least that fundamental difference from philosophy. But at the same time there is doubt about their status as science. What, then, are they?

PKJ · Nov 20, 2005

Social sciences just add another layer of interpretation to a reality previously clarified by natural science. A useful, but sometimes incorrect layer.

FreezBee · Nov 21, 2005

PKJ said:
Social sciences just add another layer of interpretation to a reality previously clarified by natural science. A useful, but sometimes incorrect layer.

Excuse me, good sir, but please do explain! How can you reduce social science to natural science?

cheers

- FreezBee

PKJ · Nov 21, 2005

FreezBee said:
Excuse me, good sir, but please do explain! How can you reduce social science to natural science?

You can't.

Still, social sciences rely on statistics, carbon datation, etc, which are all parts of natural sciences.

We could almost say the opposite (natural reduced to social).

They're used to be that paradigm you might have heard of, called positivism. These guys thought they could know everything using science. Quantum physics, and later string theories, proved them wrong. We cannot know everything, we need to build (testable, falsifiable) models to explain what can't be observed.

Post-modern natural science (post-Einstein I could say) are now arbitrary constructions (still based on observation of course), they are models. That's very similar to social sciences.

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