The philosophy of social science is the study
of the logic, methods, and foundations of
social sciences such as psychology, economics,
and political science.
Philosophers of social science are concerned
with the differences and similarities between
the social and the natural sciences, causal
relationships between social phenomena, the
possible existence of social laws, and the
ontological significance of structure and
agency.
== Auguste Comte and positivism ==
Comte first described the epistemological
perspective of positivism in The Course in
Positive Philosophy, a series of texts published
between 1830 and 1842.
These texts were followed by the 1848 work,
A General View of Positivism (published in
English in 1865).
The first three volumes of the Course dealt
chiefly with the physical sciences already
in existence (mathematics, astronomy, physics,
chemistry, biology), whereas the latter two
emphasised the inevitable coming of social
science.
Observing the circular dependence of theory
and observation in science, and classifying
the sciences in this way, Comte may be regarded
as the first philosopher of science in the
modern sense of the term.
For him, the physical sciences had necessarily
to arrive first, before humanity could adequately
channel its efforts into the most challenging
and complex "Queen science" of human society
itself.
His View of Positivism would therefore set-out
to define, in more detail, the empirical goals
of sociological method.
Comte offered an account of social evolution,
proposing that society undergoes three phases
in its quest for the truth according to a
general 'law of three stages'.
The idea bears some similarity to Marx's view
that human society would progress toward a
communist peak.
This is perhaps unsurprising as both were
profoundly influenced by the early Utopian
socialist, Henri de Saint-Simon, who was at
one time Comte's teacher and mentor.
Both Comte and Marx intended to develop, scientifically,
a new secular ideology in the wake of European
secularisation.
The early sociology of Herbert Spencer came
about broadly as a reaction to Comte.
Writing after various developments in evolutionary
biology, Spencer attempted (in vain) to reformulate
the discipline in what we might now describe
as socially Darwinistic terms (although Spencer
was a proponent of Lamarckism rather than
Darwinism).
The modern academic discipline of sociology
began with the work of Émile Durkheim (1858–1917).
While Durkheim rejected much of the detail
of Comte's philosophy, he retained and refined
its method, maintaining that the social sciences
are a logical continuation of the natural
ones into the realm of human activity, and
insisting that they may retain the same objectivity,
rationalism, and approach to causality.
Durkheim set up the first European department
of sociology at the University of Bordeaux
in 1895.
In the same year he argued, in The Rules of
Sociological Method (1895): "[o]ur main goal
is to extend scientific rationalism to human
conduct...
What has been called our positivism is but
a consequence of this rationalism."
Durkheim's seminal monograph Suicide (1897),
a case study of suicide rates amongst Catholic
and Protestant populations, distinguished
sociological analysis from psychology or philosophy.
The positivist perspective, however, has been
associated with 'scientism'; the view that
the methods of the natural sciences may be
applied to all areas of investigation, be
it philosophical, social scientific, or otherwise.
Among most social scientists and historians,
orthodox positivism has long since fallen
out of favor.
Today, practitioners of both social and physical
sciences recognize the distorting effect of
observer bias and structural limitations.
This scepticism has been facilitated by a
general weakening of deductivist accounts
of science by philosophers such as Thomas
Kuhn, and new philosophical movements such
as critical realism and neopragmatism.
Positivism has also been espoused by 'technocrats'
who believe in the inevitability of social
progress through science and technology.
The philosopher-sociologist Jürgen Habermas
has critiqued pure instrumental rationality
as meaning that scientific-thinking becomes
something akin to ideology itself.Durkheim,
Marx, and Weber are more typically cited as
the fathers of contemporary social science.
In psychology, a positivistic approach has
historically been favoured in behaviourism.
== Epistemology ==
In any discipline, there will always be a
number of underlying philosophical predispositions
in the projects of scientists.
Some of these predispositions involve the
nature of social knowledge itself, the nature
of social reality, and the locus of human
control in action.
Intellectuals have disagreed about the extent
to which the social sciences should mimic
the methods used in the natural sciences.
The founding positivists of the social sciences
argued that social phenomena can and should
be studied through conventional scientific
methods.
This position is closely allied with scientism,
naturalism and physicalism; the doctrine that
all phenomena are ultimately reducible to
physical entities and physical laws.
Opponents of naturalism, including advocates
of the verstehen method, contended that there
is a need for an interpretive approach to
the study of human action, a technique radically
different from natural science.
The fundamental task for the philosophy of
social science has thus been to question the
extent to which positivism may be characterized
as 'scientific' in relation to fundamental
epistemological foundations.
These debates also rage within contemporary
social sciences with regard to subjectivity,
objectivity, intersubjectivity and practicality
in the conduct of theory and research.
Philosophers of social science examine further
epistemologies and methodologies, including
realism, critical realism, instrumentalism,
functionalism, structuralism, interpretivism,
phenomenology, and post-structuralism.
Though essentially all major social scientists
since the late 19th century have accepted
that the discipline faces challenges that
are different from those of the natural sciences,
the ability to determine causal relationships
invokes the same discussions held in science
meta-theory.
Positivism has sometimes met with caricature
as a breed of naive empiricism, yet the word
has a rich history of applications stretching
from Comte to the work of the Vienna Circle
and beyond.
By the same token, if positivism is able to
identify causality, then it is open to the
same critical rationalist non-justificationism
presented by Karl Popper, which may itself
be disputed through Thomas Kuhn's conception
of epistemic paradigm shift.
Early German hermeneuticians such as Wilhelm
Dilthey pioneered the distinction between
natural and social science ('Geisteswissenschaft').
This tradition greatly informed Max Weber
and Georg Simmel's antipositivism, and continued
with critical theory.
Since the 1960s, a general weakening of deductivist
accounts of science has grown side-by-side
with critiques of "scientism", or 'science
as ideology'.
Jürgen Habermas argues, in his On the Logic
of the Social Sciences (1967), that "the positivist
thesis of unified science, which assimilates
all the sciences to a natural-scientific model,
fails because of the intimate relationship
between the social sciences and history, and
the fact that they are based on a situation-specific
understanding of meaning that can be explicated
only hermeneutically … access to a symbolically
prestructured reality cannot be gained by
observation alone."
Verstehende social theory has been the concern
of phenomenological works, such as Alfred
Schütz Phenomenology of the Social World
(1932) and Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and
Method (1960).
Phenomenology would later prove influential
in the subject-centred theory of the post-structuralists.
The mid-20th-century linguistic turn led to
a rise in highly philosophical sociology,
as well as so-called "postmodern" perspectives
on the social acquisition of knowledge.
One notable critique of social science is
found in Peter Winch's Wittgensteinian text
The Idea of Social Science and its Relation
to Philosophy (1958).
Michel Foucault provides a potent critique
in his archaeology of the human sciences,
though Habermas and Richard Rorty have both
argued that Foucault merely replaces one such
system of thought with another.One underlying
problem for the social psychologist is whether
studies can or should ultimately be understood
in terms of the meaning and consciousness
behind social action, as with folk psychology,
or whether more objective, natural, materialist,
and behavioral facts are to be given exclusive
study.
This problem is especially important for those
within the social sciences who study qualitative
mental phenomena, such as consciousness, associative
meanings, and mental representations, because
a rejection of the study of meanings would
lead to the reclassification of such research
as non-scientific.
Influential traditions like psychodynamic
theory and symbolic interactionism may be
the first victims of such a paradigm shift.
The philosophical issues lying in wait behind
these different positions have led to commitments
to certain kinds of methodology which have
sometimes bordered on the partisan.
Still, many researchers have indicated a lack
of patience for overly dogmatic proponents
of one method or another.Social research remains
extremely common and effective in practise
with respect to political institutions and
businesses.
Michael Burawoy has marked the difference
between public sociology, which is focused
firmly on practical applications (though see
e.g. Thibodeaux, 2016), and academic or professional
sociology, which involves dialogue amongst
other social scientists and philosophers.
== Ontology ==
Structure and agency forms an enduring debate
in social theory: "Do social structures determine
an individual's behaviour or does human agency?"
In this context 'agency' refers to the capacity
of individuals to act independently and make
free choices, whereas 'structure' refers to
factors which limit or affect the choices
and actions of individuals (such as social
class, religion, gender, ethnicity, and so
on).
Discussions over the primacy of structure
or agency relate to the very core of social
ontology ("What is the social world made of?",
"What is a cause in the social world, and
what is an effect?").
One attempt to reconcile postmodern critiques
with the overarching project of social science
has been the development, particularly in
Britain, of critical realism.
For critical realists such as Roy Bhaskar,
traditional positivism commits an 'epistemic
fallacy' by failing to address the ontological
conditions which make science possible: that
is, structure and agency itself.
== See also ==
== References ==
== Bibliography ==
Braybrooke, David (1986).
Philosophy of Social Science.
Prentice Hall.
ISBN 0-13-663394-3.
Hollis, Martin (1994).
The Philosophy of Social Science: An Introduction.
Cambridge.
ISBN 0-521-44780-1.
Little, Daniel (1991).
Varieties of Social Explanation : An Introduction
to the Philosophy of Social Science.
Westview Press.
ISBN 0-8133-0566-7.
Rosenberg, Alexander (1995).
Philosophy of Social Science.
Westview Harper Collins.
Kaldis, Byron (ed.) (2013) Encyclopedia of
Philosophy and the Social Sciences, Sage
=== Journals ===
Philosophy of the Social Sciences
=== Conferences ===
Philosophy of Social Science Roundtable
EUROPEAN NETWORK FOR THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE
SOCIAL SCIENCES
=== Graduate programs ===
Master of Science in Philosophy of the Social
Sciences at the LSE
=== Books ===
Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social
Sciences, Byron Kaldis, SAGE, 2013
Philosophy of Social Science by Alexander
Rosenberg
The Philosophy of Social Science: An Introduction
by Martin Hollis
Contemporary Philosophy of Social Science:
A Multicultural Approach by Brian Fay
Philosophy of social science: the methods,
ideals, and politics of social inquiry by
Michael Root
== External links ==
"Philosophy of social science".
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Philosophy of social sciences (From Robert
Audi's Cambridge Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Philosophy of social sciences (Routledge Encyclopedia
of Philosophy Online)
