Subjectivism and Objectivism in the Social Sciences

Extract

Philosophizing about the social sciences involves an initial problem of denotation. Although the natural sciences are the scene of intramural disputes like those between proponents of quantum mechanics and relativity theory, no one doubts either what the natural sciences are or that they are sciences; and all of them may be said to use, broadly speaking, the same scientific method. But the case of the social sciences is different. It resembles somewhat the situation in mathematics where the intuitionists deny that non-constructible concepts or problems belong to mathematics; and even more the situation in philosophy where groups like the analysts and the existentialists not only do not speak the same language but do not even recognize one another's right to be called “philosophy.” Similarly, the disciplines which comprise the social sciences today differ from one another in basic ways, involving long-standing disputes over which ones have a right to the names of the several social sciences and what their proper methods are. Familiar examples of these disputes are the controversies between the classicists and institutionalists in economics, and between the analytical and sociological schools in jurispurdence. Consequently, it is impossible for philosophers, or social scientists philosophizing about their general field, to proceed to discuss “the” subject-matter or “the” method of “the” social sciences as if the phrases containing these definite articles were definite descriptions on whose objects there was general agreement.