Social Philosophy
American sociology, with the significant exception of symbolic interactionism, generally has turned to Europe for a philosophical grounding. The years after World War II, when Talcott Parsons at Harvard and Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton at Columbia dominated the field, were no exception. Parsons had studied in Germany and had translated Weber; Lazarsfeld brought to the United States an Austrian philosophical heritage; Merton was a specialist in the philosophy and sociology of science. Under the guidance of these three men, American sociology was strongly influenced by the philosophers of the Vienna Circle, especially Carnap and Popper, and to a lesser degree by British logical positivism.
The common ingredient in this philosophical heritage was the notion that there were few obstacles to the creation of a science of human behavior modeled on the natural sciences. A great deal of attention was paid to hypothesis testing, criteria for evidence, and the nature of statistical proof. Most important, this way of thinking assumed that there was a social reality that would prove to have the same nature as physical reality. A predictive science of human behavior was possible because the social world was assumed to work in lawlike ways. The problems of the social sciences lay in discovering reality, not in the nature of reality.
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