Social and Scientific Method or What Do We Make of the Distinction Between the Natural and the Social Sciences?

Abstract

Ever since the rise of the social sciences, social science methodology has been a much disputed issue among social scientists and philosophers of the social sciences. 1 Much like the history of social theory, the history of social science methodology is a history of controversy, and this tradition is quite naturally renewed with every appearance of a new conception of social life. Most recently, methodological discussions have centered around the discrediting of received 'positivistic' procedures by showing their essential inadequacy in dealing with the social world. In these discussions, established methodological procedures such as survey research or laboratory experimentation were linked to a model of scientific method identified with the natural sciences, and new social methodologies continuously emphasized their rejection of this model. In fact, new rules of social science method have been developed, displayed and defended in a constant dispute with the standard set by this natural science model, and they have made the departure from this standard the declared goal of an indigenuous social methodology. Perhaps not surprisingly, the standard itself has found little attention in the dispute. While the 'positivistic' conception is vigorously rejected as a model for social science methodologies, it is more or less taken at face value when it refers to the natural and technological sciences. Philosophical investigations which for some time now have directly questioned this model as correctly describing the natural sciences appear to be either ignored or declared irrelevant for the discussion. When they are introduced into the picture, they serve as some sort of back-