What does philosophy as a social science discipline/research program say today?

Abstract

It is known that the theory of science deals with the natural sciences and even constructs its own special field of study according to the natural sciences. However, the debates on the nature and method of social sciences in the nineteenth century and the philosophical orientations in the twentieth century brought up the fundamental problem of science again. Philosophy has had to intervene in the process due to the changes and shocks that have emerged in the natural and social sciences. Because the ground on which science is based and the gains it has achieved as a result of deep research processes have not revealed a situation that can build or legitimize its own foundation. No ground was found to substantiate the claim that science is "the only reliable method of arriving at the truth about the nature of things." At this point, a new epistemological (i.e., philosophical) orientation was needed. In addition, philosophy's handling of the sciences in a new way, examining and analyzing the presuppositions of science more carefully than ever before, has created a new common ground between philosophy and science. Despite this background, there have been approaches to fill the mentioned void without philosophy. For example, "neopositivism" or "logical empiricism", which emerged with the work of the Vienna Circle in the 1930s, voiced its claim to be an alternative to classical epistemology and displayed an anti-philosophical attitude. However, in the final analysis, these attempts could not meet the need for philosophy in the field of science. Abandoning the idea that philosophy today can develop a 'final terminology' that transcends all other terminologies, it is a research program that accompanies all fields of human research with a critical approach and analyzes the nature of these fields; It is necessary to realize that there is a search for questioning and giving consistent answers within its own systematic. This point is that philosophy is a field from where and how we can obtain probabilities, not exact information, that unfolds our experiences in its own reality; It can be considered to represent an activity that “constructs” our experiences by reporting current situations of life. This paper aims to reveal what philosophy can say today as a human research program.