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The Norms of Social Inquiry and Masculine Experience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2022

Sandra Harding
Sandra Harding*
Affiliation:
University of Delaware
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Extract

For more than a century social scientists and philosophers of social science have argued about whether or not the ontology and methodology for inquiry in the physical sciences is appropriate to capture adequately the regularities of social life and their underlying causal determinants. The issue arises because of the prima facie fact that human actions are structured not only by the laws governing the behavior of physical matter, but also by intentional systems—that is, by culture-wide systems of concepts, rules, conventions and beliefs, and by individual systems of perceptions, motives, and goals arrived at within these cultural systems. Consequently, it is not possible either to identify or to classify human actions apart from this intentional dimension within which human action occurs. Whether, and how, this difference in the nature of the subject matter of social inquiry requires “deviating” from the “logic” of the natural sciences then becomes the substance of the dispute.

Type
Part V. Social Values and Social Science
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1980 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1980 , 1980 , pp. 305 - 324
Copyright
Copyright © 1981 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

A University of Delaware Summer Faculty Research Fellowship and a NEH Summer Research Fellowship supported the research for this paper. Conversations with Nancy Hartsock improved my thinking on these issues.

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