CHAPTER 2naturalism and The Unity of Scientific Method
CHAPTER 2naturalism and The Unity of Scientific Method
CHAPTER 2naturalism and The Unity of Scientific Method
The philosophy of social science can be described broadly as having two aims. First, it
seeks to produce a rational reconstruction of social science. This entails describing the
philosophical assumptions that underpin the practice of social inquiry, just as the
philosophy of natural science seeks to lay bare the methodological and ontological
assumptions that guide scientific investigation of natural phenomena. Second, the
philosophy of social science seeks to critique the social sciences with the aim of
enhancing their ability to explain the social world or otherwise improve our
understanding of it. Thus philosophy of social science is both descriptive and
prescriptive. As such, it concerns a number of interrelated questions. These include:
What is the method (or methods) of social science? Does social science use the same
methods as natural science? If not, should it aspire to? Or are the methods appropriate
to social inquiry fundamentally different from those of natural science? Is scientific
investigation of the social world even possible – or desirable? What type of knowledge
does social inquiry produce? Can the social sciences be objective and value neutral?
Should they strive to be? Does the social world represent a unique realm of inquiry with
its own properties and laws? Or can the regularities and other properties of the social
world be reduced to facts about individuals?
The following article will survey how philosophers of social science have addressed and
debated these questions. It will begin by examining the question of whether social
inquiry can – or should – have the same aims and use the same methods as the natural
sciences. This is perhaps the most central and enduring issue in the philosophy of social
science. Addressing it inevitably leads to discussion of other key controversies in the
field, such as the nature of explanation of social phenomena and the possibility of value-
free social science. Following examination of the views of proponents and critics of
social inquiry modeled on the natural sciences will be a discussion of the debate between
methodological individualists and methodological holists. This issue concerns whether
social phenomena can be reduced to facts about individuals. The penultimate section of
the article asks the question: How does social science as currently practiced enhance our
understanding of the social world? Even if social science falls short of the goals of
natural science, such as uncovering lawlike regularities and predicting phenomena, it
nonetheless may still produce valuable knowledge. The article closes with a brief
discussion of methodological pluralism. No single approach to social inquiry seems
capable of capturing all aspects of social reality. But a kind of unification of the social
sciences can be posited by envisioning the various methods as participating in an on-
going dialogue with each other.
Naturalism
In philosophy, a theory that relates scientific method to philosophy by affirming
that all beings and events in the universe (whatever their inherent character may be) are
natural. Consequently, all knowledge of the universe falls within the pale of scientific
investigation. Although naturalism denies the existence of truly supernatural realities, it
makes allowance for the supernatural, provided that knowledge of it can be had
indirectly—that is, that natural objects be influenced by the so-called supernatural
entities in a detectable way.
Only rarely do naturalists give attention to metaphysics (which they deride), and they
make no philosophical attempts to establish their position. Naturalists simply assert
that nature is reality, the whole of it. There is nothing beyond, nothing “other than,” no
“other world” of being.
Naturalism’s greatest vogue occurred during the 1930s and ’40s, chiefly in the United
States among philosophers such as F.J.E. Woodbridge, Morris R. Cohen, John
Dewey, Ernest Nagel, and Sidney Hook.
For a variety of reasons, positivism began to fall out of favor among philosophers of
science beginning in the latter half of the twentieth century. Perhaps its most
problematic feature was the logical positivists’ commitment to the verifiability criterion
of meaning. Not only did this implausibly relegate a slew of traditional philosophical
questions to the category of meaningless, it also called into question the validity of
employing unobservable theoretical entities, processes and forces in natural science
theories. Logical positivists held that in principle the properties of unobservables, such
as electrons, quarks or genes, could be translated into observable effects. In practice,
however, such derivations generally proved impossible, and ridding unobservable
entities of their explanatory role would require dispensing with the most successful
science of the twentieth century.
Despite the collapse of positivism as a philosophical movement, it continues to exercise
influence on contemporary advocates of the unity of scientific method. Though there are
important disagreements among naturalists about the proper methodology of science,
three core tenets that trace their origin to positivism can be identified. First, advocates
of naturalism remain wedded to the view that science is a fundamentally empirical
enterprise. Second, most naturalists hold that the primary aim of science is to produce
causal explanations grounded in lawlike regularities. And, finally, naturalists typically
support value neutrality – the view that the role of science is to describe and explain the
world, not to make value judgments.