A Study in Philosophy and the Social Sciences

Abstract

My intention in this essay is not to survey either the historical or the structural relationships between philosophy and the social sciences, but rather to focus on a basic systematic problem in methodology: the philosophical character and implications of the methods of social-scientific inquiry. By "methodology" I understand the underlying conceptual framework in terms of which concrete studies in history, sociology, economics, and the like are carried out, and in terms of which they receive a general rationale. Therefore I am not concerned here with the nature of specific techniques that social scientists utilize, or with their evaluation. Instead, I am interested in what I take to be a distinctly philosophical task, the analysis of the underlying presuppositions of the conceptual systems employed by social scientists in virtue of which their scientific enterprise is carried out. Methodology in the sense in which I am using it thus implies a certain order of philosophical commitment.