Abstract

This chapter discusses the inferiority complex status of social sciences when compared to natural sciences. The social sciences and the natural sciences are compared and contrasted on many scores, and the discussions are often quite unsystematic. If one tries to review them systematically, one shall encounter a good deal of overlap and unavoidable duplication. Nonetheless, it will help if one enumerates in advance some of the grounds of comparison most often mentioned—grounds on which the social sciences are judged to come out second best. There is a great deal of truth, and important truth, in this comparison. Some philosophers were so impressed with the invariance of nature and the variability of social phenomena that they used this difference as the criterion in the definitions of natural and cultural sciences. This implies a rejection of the contention that all fields that are normally called social sciences suffer from a lack of invariance; indeed, economics is here considered so much a matter of immutable laws of nature that it is handed over to the natural sciences.

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