Premium
On the Possibility of Social Scientific Knowledge and the Limits of Naturalism
Author(s) -
BHASKAR ROY
Publication year - 1978
Publication title -
journal for the theory of social behaviour
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.615
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1468-5914
pISSN - 0021-8308
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-5914.1978.tb00389.x
Subject(s) - naturalism , george (robot) , sociology , epistemology , citation , philosophy , computer science , library science , artificial intelligence
In this paper I want to discuss an old question that refuses to lie down. It is a question that continually resurfaces in philosophical discussions on the social sciences and reappears, in one guise or another, in methodological discussions within them: to what extent can society be studied in the same w a y as nature! Without exaggerating, I think one could call this question the primal problem of the philosphy of the social sciences. For the history of that subject has been dominated by a dispute between two traditions. The first-a naturalistic tradition-has typically seen science as (actually or ideally) undied in its concordance with positivist principles, based in the last instance on the Humean notion of law. The second-a rival anti-naturalist tradition, of hermeneutics-has posited, by contrast, a radical distinction in method between the natural and social sciences, flowing from and grounded in the idea of a radical distinction in their subject matters. The philosophical lineage of this tradition is traceable back through Weber and Dilthey to the transcendental idealism of Kant. Within the Marxist camp an exactly parallel dispute has occurred, with the so-called ‘dialectical materialists’ on one side and Lukics, the Frankfurt school and Sartre on the other. Now, with the possible exception of the ‘dialectical materialists’ (whose specificity I do not want to discuss here), the great error that unites these disputants is their acceptance of an essentially positivist account of natural science, and more generally of an empiricist ontology. This is very evident if one looks a t Peter Winch’s The Idea ofa Social Science, perhaps the most influential tract written within the so-called ‘analytical’ school. Winch, it will be remembered, wants to argue that there is an essential identity between philosphy and social science, on the one hand, and a fundamental contrast between the latter and the natural sciences, on the other. When we turn to his arguments for such a contrast we find that they boil down to two. The first is an argument to the effect that constant conjunctions of events are neither sufficient nor (contrary to e.g.