Epistemology, Methodology, and the Social Sciences

The last decades have seen major reformations in the philosophy and history of science. What has been called 'post-positivist' philosophy of science has introduced radically new concerns with historical, social, and valuative components of scientific thought in the natural sciences, and has raised up the demons of relativism, subjectivism and sociologism to haunt the once calm precincts of objectivity and realism. Though these disturbances intruded upon what had seemed to be the logically well-ordered domain of the philoso phy of the natural sciences, they were no news to the social sciences. There, the messy business of human action, volition, decision, the considerations of practical purposes and social values, the role of ideology and the problem of rationality, had long conspired to defeat logical-reconstructionist programs. The attempt to tarne the social sciences to the harness of a strict hypothetico deductive model of explanation failed. Within the social sciences, phenome nological, Marxist, hermeneuticist, action-theoretical approaches vied in attempting to capture the distinctiveness of human phenomena. In fact, the philosophy of the natural sciences, even in its 'hard' forms, has itself become infected with the increasing reflection upon the role of such social-scientific categories, in the attempt to understand the nature of the scientific enterprise.

Inhalt
Ideology and Objectivity.- Toward a Logic of Historical Constitution.- Beyond Causality in the Social Sciences: Reciprocity as a Model of Non-exploitative Social Relations.- Empiricism and the Philosophy of Science, or, n Dogmas of Empiricism.- Realism and the Supposed Poverty of Sociological Theories.- The Role and Status of the Rationality Principle in the Social Sciences.- Marxian Paradigms versus Microeconomic Structures.- Paradise not Surrendered: Jewish Reactions to Copernicus and the Growth of Modern Science.- The Peculiar Evolutionary Strategy of Man.- Technologies as Forms of Life.- Index of Names.