Suchergebnisse

The status of social science vis-a-vis the scientific community as a whole is examined. Five characteristics are necessary for a field to be empirically classified as a science: (1) the presence & systematic testing of hypotheses; (2) precise measurement; (3) careful & publically testable observation; (4) sophisticated conceptual structures; & (5) shared paradigms. The social sciences are argued to embrace these traits, & thus qualify as true science from this point of view. The impact of social investigation's cognitive activity on the social order is assessed; no radically different insights from ordinary thought are apparent. The lack of progression in paradigms seems to undermine social science's overall status as science. R. McCarthy.

THE ORIGINS OF INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY CONTINUE TO BE AN object of scholarly dispute. It seems to be very probable that this will continue to be so forever. An enormously complex transformation occurred in a very large, diversified and intricate society, and the event was unique: no imitative industrialization can be treated as an event of the same kind as the original industrialization, simply in virtue of the fact that all the others were indeed imitative, were performed in the light of the now established knowledge that the thing could be done and had certain advantages (though the emulated ideal was of course interpreted in all kinds of quite diverse ways). So we can never repeat the original event which is to be understood, which was perpetrated by men who knew not what they did, and this was of its essence: we cannot do this, for quite a number of cogent reasons - the sheer fact of repetition makes it different from the original occasion; one cannot in any case reproduce all the circumstances of early modern Western Europe; and experiments on such a scale, for the sake of establishing a theoretical point, are morally hardly conceivable. In any case, to sort out causal threads in so complex a process, we should need not one, but very, very many re-runs, and these will never be available to us.