2007 Kneller Lecture, AESA Getting Lost: Social Science and/as Philosophy

Abstract

This article probes how philosophical structures are immanent in empirical work and how philosophy might be understood when it is within the precincts of science. My interest is in both opening philosophy to disruption by a science that knows itself as inside history and opening science to the costs of its inability to tolerate the necessary lack in any determinism. Against the more typical focus on how philosophy provides the reason of science, here the task is to rethink the relation between empirical work and philosophy in a way that posits an engagement with not knowing as an ethical and political move. The goal of such a project is a double(d) science that works the necessary tensions that structure contemporary social science as fertile ground for the production of new practices where theoretical complexities are used as tools to make a material difference in terms of "what works" in the public interest.