Philosophy of Social Sciences
The "philosophy of social sciences" comes in three varieties, as the metaideology, the metaphysics, and the methodology of the disciplines involved. The metaideology looks at how far different, traditional legitimations of social sciences succeed. The metaphysics looks at questions having to do with what social science posits—what things it says there are—and at how far those posits are consistent with more or less commonplace beliefs. And the methodology looks at questions regarding the nature of observations, laws, and theories in social science, the logic of induction and confirmation, the requirements of understanding and explanation, and so on.
Metaideology
The social sciences were conceived and pursued, from the very beginning, under the influence of ideals (particularly of scientific objectivity and progress) deriving from the eighteenth-century enlightenment (Hawthorn 1976). The first social scientists were economists and sociologists, as we would call them today, and they were self-consciously concerned about producing something that would count, not as philosophy, not as literature, not as common sense, but as science: as a project faithful to the image forged by natural science.
The scientific intention—the intention to make science—has remained characteristic of work in the social sciences. It puts social scientists, paradoxically, under an obligation of an ideological kind: the obligation to show that the sort of analysis they pursue is of a properly scientific kind.
This is a free page. This page contains 201 words. This
article contains 3,052 words (approx. 10 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Article with our Philosophy of Social Sciences Access Pass.
