Jurisprudence Project

Impact of natural science methodology on social science

Hint: structure of scientific revolution

In Science, the term natural science refers to a naturalistic approach to the study of the
universe, which is understood as obeying rules or laws of natural origin. Overall, natural
science is the core of all sciences.

The term natural science is also used to distinguish those fields that use the scientific
method to study nature from the social sciences and the humanities, which use the
scientific method to study human behavior and society; and from the formal sciences,
such as mathematics and logic, which use a different (a priori) methodology.

Natural sciences form the basis for the living and the dead applied sciences. Together, the
natural and applied sciences are distinguished from the social sciences on the one hand,
and the liberal arts (humanities, theology, etc.) on the other. Though mathematics,
statistics, and computer science are not considered natural sciences (mathematics
traditionally considered among the liberal arts and statistics among the humanities, for
instance), they provide many tools and frameworks used within the natural sciences.

Alongside this traditional usage, the phrase natural sciences is also sometimes used more
narrowly to refer to its everyday usage, that is, related to natural history. In this sense
"natural sciences" may refer to the biology and perhaps also the earth sciences, as
distinguished from the physical sciences, including astronomy, physics, and chemistry.

Within the natural sciences, the term hard science is sometimes used to describe those
sub-fields that rely on experimental, quantifiable data or the scientific method and focus
on accuracy and objectivity. These usually include physics, chemistry and biology. By
contrast, soft science is often used to describe the scientific fields that are more reliant on
qualitative research, including the social sciences.

The social sciences are the fields of scientific knowledge and academic scholarship that
study social groups and, more generally, human society.[1] The social sciences initially
were constituted of five fields: Jurisprudence and Amendment of the Law; Education;
Health; Economy and Trade; Art.[2] The contemporary field of science comprise
academic disciplines concerned with the study of the social life of human groups, animals
and individuals; This includes anthropology, archaeology, philology, communication
studies, cultural studies, demography, economics, human geography, history, linguistics,
media studies, political science, psychology, social work, and sociology (the latter often
synonymous with the term 'social science' itself).

According to Weber, differences between the natural sciences and the social sciences
arise from differences in the cognitive intentions of the investigator, not from the alleged
inapplicability of scientific and generalizing methods to the subject matter of human
action. What distinguishes the natural and social sciences is not an inherent difference in
methods of investigation, but rather the differing interests and aims of the scientist. Both
types of science involve abstraction. The richness of the world of facts, both in nature and
in history, is such that a total explanation in either realm is doomed to fail. Even in
physics it is impossible to predict future events in all their concrete detail. No one, for
example, can calculate in advance the dispersion of the fragments of an exploding shell.
Prediction becomes possible only within a system of conceptualizations that excludes
concern for those concrete facts not caught in the net of abstractions. Both the natural and
the social sciences must abstract from the manifold aspects of reality; they always
involve selection.

The natural scientist is primarily interested in those aspects of natural events that can be
formulated in terms of abstract laws. While the social scientist may wish to search for
such lawful abstract generalizations in human behavior, he is also interested in particular
qualities of human actors and in the meaning they ascribe to their actions. Any scientific
method must make a selection from the infinite variety of empirical reality. When the
social scientist adopts a generalizing method, he abstracts from random unique aspects of
the reality he considers; concrete individual actions are conceived as "cases" or
"instances," which are subsumed under theoretical generalizations. The individualizing
approach, in contrast, neglects generic elements and concentrates attention on particular
features of phenomena or concrete historical actors. Both methods are defensible,
provided neither is alleged to encompass phenomena in their totality. Neither method is
privileged or inherently superior to the other.

The social sciences in general and economics in particular cannot be based on experience
in the sense in which this term is used by the natural sciences. Social experience is
historical experience. Of course every experience is the experience of something passed.
But what distinguishes social experience from that which forms the basis of the natural
sciences is that it is always the experience of a complexity of phenomena. The experience
to which the natural sciences owe all their success is the experience of the experiment. In
the experiments the different elements of change are observed in isolation. The control of
the conditions of change provides the experimenter with the means of assigning to each
effect its sufficient cause. Without regard to the philosophical problem involved he
proceeds to amass "facts." These facts are the bricks which the scientist uses in
constructing his theories. They constitute the only material at his disposal.

It is instructive to compare the technique of dealing with experience in the social sciences
with that in the natural sciences. We have many books on economics which, after having
developed a theory, annex chapters in which an attempt is made to verify the theory
developed by an appeal to the facts. This is not the way which the natural scientist takes.
He starts from facts experimentally established and builds up his theory in using them. If
his theory allows a deduction that predicts a state of affairs not yet discovered in
experiments he describes what kind of experiment would be crucial for his theory; the
theory seems to be verified if the result conforms to the prediction. This is something
radically and significantly different from the approach taken by the social sciences.

Natural and social science share some common ground. Much of this commonality
concerns concrete methodological procedures. What is shared is “the principle controlled
interferences and verifications by fellow scientists and theoretical ideas of unity,
simplicity and universality and precision prevail. This includes the notion that statements
may be made in propositional form and theories will involve “determinate relations
between a set of variable in terms in which a fairly extensive class of empirically
ascertainable regularities can be explained”.

Since Comte positivism in the philosophy of social science has been tied up with what
has been called naturalism--the view that the social sciences ought to attempt to
approximate the natural sciences by embracing their methodology. Comte viewed all
sciences as progressing through three stages of development in the knowledge they
attain--from theological to metaphysical knowledge and finally to positivist knowledge.
He saw the natural and mathematical sciences as having completed this progression and
sought to bring the sciences of society-which he saw as the pinnacle of the sciences to the
same point. In fact, since Comte methodological unity has attained something like the
status of holy writ in positivist circles, with faith in this doctrine constituting the key
identifying feature of otherwise disparate positivist philosophies of science. This belief
has been of some consequence to the role of interpretation thought to be appropriate in
the social sciences. Positive science is fundamentally hostile to the idea of interpretation
in scientific understanding for reasons that can be traced back to its fundamental tenets.
The positivist reliance of empiricist epistemology is particularly important in this regard.
If knowledge flows from observation, as empiricism holds, then the certainty of our
knowledge is directly tied to the certainty of our observations. Observations that are
uncertain; that is to say, observations that require conscious interpretation on the part of
the researcher, are suspect. If we extend this logic to the preferred method of theory-
testing in the natural sciences, experimentation, we come to the conclusion that the best
experimental result in this model is the self-evident one, the observation that requires no
such interpretation. This brings to the fore a further basic belief of positivism:
scientific knowledge is objective and value-neutral. The results of an experiment are
independent of the beliefs, preferences, values, and individual psychology of the
experimenter. No matter who conducts (and thus observes) a given experiment, the result
must be consistent in order to be a valid source of scientific knowledge. This is the
essence of the replicability that underlies claims to scientific knowledge. Insofar as an
observation requires interpretation, a subjective element remains. Hence experiments are
designed so as to minimize subjective elements.

This is all well and good in the natural sciences (except that it is not all well and good,
but we'll get to that), but it is not immediately clear whether this kind of explanation and
the attendant view of interpretation are appropriate or even possible in the social sciences.
Appropriate or not, however, the appeal of positivist philosophy of science to social
scientists is eminently understandable.