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The philosophy of social science is the study of the logic and method of the social sciences, such as sociology, anthropology 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.

[edit] 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.^[1] 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 to natural science.^[2] 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 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. A particularly famous criticism of sociological positivism in the cannon of literature on the philosophy of social science is found in Peter Winch's The Idea of Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (1958). Winch's Wittgensteinian work argues that social science, through the use of its particular languages, is little more than a style of, or interface for, philosophy, and thus largely metaphysical.

Max Weber and Georg Simmel pioneered the antipositivist perspective within sociology. Weber proposed that 'social action' is the fundamental building block of social phenomena, and thus the object of examination for sociologists through holistic and interpretative means. The linguistic and cultural turns of the mid-20th century marked a further step away from positivism, and a rise in increasingly abstract literary and hermeneutic material in social science, as well as so-called "postmodern" perspectives on the social acquisition of knowledge. Despite these shifts away from scientism, the political and ideological motivations inherent in even the most antipositivist research may be scrutinized. Michel Foucault provides an anti-humanist critique of psychology and sociology in his archaeology of the human sciences. Both Jürgen Habermas and Richard Rorty have argued, however, that Foucault merely replaces one such system of thought with another, failing to sketch any 'successor subject' to epistemology.^[3] Habermas in particular accuses Foucault of presenting a new functionalism.^[4]

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^[5]. 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, and academic or professional sociology, which involves dialogue amongst other social scientists and philosophers. In recent years sociologists have frequently engaged with figures such as Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty, just as social philosophy has often met with social theory.

[edit] 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.

[edit] The Sokal affair

In 1996, certain so-called 'postmodern' theorists of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) were the targets of a hoax paper by Alan Sokal in the journal Social Text, under the title Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. The ensuing debate led to these thinkers being accused of "relativism"--a charge that at least some proponents of the view embrace. The supposed 'relativism' prevalent within the SSK, especially in the work of 'strong sociologists' such as Barry Barnes and David Bloor, may be regarded as a misnomer even though these sociologists themselves assent to the label. This is because the strong programme does not deny the existence of a human-independent reality. Neither does it affirm that all knowledge claims are 'really true' just because the relevant community accepts them as true. The position of strong sociology is that sociologically interesting knowledge (e.g. institutionalised forms of knowledge) are human products even when they have been formulated as a result of interaction with a human-independent physical world as is the case in the so-called natural sciences. Such sociologically interesting knowledge is not given with the physical world but is a product of group/social processes. They claim that passively observing the world will not convince 'rational' individuals to assent to such knowledge.

[edit] See also

• Positivism
• Antipositivism
• Social facts
• Verstehen
• Interculturalism

• Philosophy of history
• Philosophy of economics
• Political philosophy
• Philosophy of psychology

[edit] References

1. ^ Cote, James E. and Levine, Charles G. (2002). Identity formation, Agency, and Culture, Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
2. ^ Robert Audi, ed (1999). The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Second ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 704. ISBN 0 521 63722 8. 
3. ^ Richard Rorty. Foucault and Epistemology in Hoy, D (eds) 'Foucault: A critical reader' Basil Blackwell. Oxford, 1986.
4. ^ Jürgen Habermas. Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present in Hoy, D (eds) 'Foucault: A critical reader' Basil Blackwell. Oxford, 1986.
5. ^ Slife, B.D. and Gantt, E.E. (1999) Methodological pluralism: a framework for psychotherapy research. Journal of clinical psychology, 55(12), pp1453-1465.

[edit] Bibliography

• Braybrooke, David (1986). Philosophy of Social Science. Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-663394-3. 
• Flyvbjerg, Bent (2001). Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again. Cambridge. ISBN 052177568X. 
• 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. 

[edit] Journals

• Philosophy of the Social Sciences

[edit] Conferences

• Philosophy of Social Science Roundtable

[edit] Graduate Programs

• Master of Science in Philosophy of the Social Sciences at the LSE

[edit] Books

• 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

[edit] External links

• Philosophy of social sciences (Daniel Little's article for the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
• Philosophy of social sciences (Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online)