Abstract
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.
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