Professional Documents
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Guadalupe Niklison
generally unknown conditions or with indeterminate consequences. (p. 36) He adds that these
mechanisms, although they allow us to explain it, they cannot predict social behavior. Elster argues that
these explanations aim to demonstrate the rational cause for an action. As Jim Bogen (2004) states,
causality is one thing, and regularity, another. (p. 4) Mechanisms cant give us as accurate
explanations as laws, but they are useful, as they do shape our understanding of the society we live in.
For example, the law of supply and demand in economics is definitely tied to a certain context and is
bound to have exceptions; it does not have the characteristics to be an absolute law, but it does help in
the understanding of the relationship between price and supply or demand. It is a mechanism. What
anti-naturalists have also call into attention is the power that predictive laws give to authorities; they
point that it is frequent that thanks to social discoveries, those in power have the ability to manipulate
society for their own benefit.
Until now, social sciences have failed to uncover laws about how human behave and the
consequences of that behavior. One reason for this is the complexity of the social world: it is based on
human beings, and human actions depend not only in natural causes, but also psychological, moral,
social or economic reasons, among others. The flaw of many proposed laws (especially economic laws)
is that they are based on the rational choice theory the assumption that individuals always make
prudent and logical decisions that provide them with the greatest benefit or satisfaction and that are in
their highest self-interest and the fact is that humans dont always act rationally. Interpretivists believe
that it is misguided to try to find laws that rule social behavior and the focus should be in enhancing our
understanding of the causes and consequences it has. Yet another impediment to discovering general
laws is the impossibility or difficulty to conduct controlled experiments that faces social science in
contrast with natural sciences: in the social sciences, it is not ethical or even practical to manipulate
variables in a controlled environment in order to test hypothesis. The fact that there are so many
obstacles in obtaining universal laws is another argument that supports that social sciences shouldnt
seek to find them.
It is true that the social world has meaning in a way the natural world doesnt. Parting from this fact,
it is difficult to state that uncovering general laws should be the main aim of social sciences. The
scientific method can and should be applied in situations that allow it, but always taking in account that
social sciences object of study hasnt the same features as the natural sciences objects, so the same
differentiations should be made on how it is studied and in the aspired results. The essential point of
social science is not, therefore, to uncover laws, but rather these laws are another tool subordinated to
the major aim of social studies: to enhance our understanding of human condition and behavior. Social
science has predictive power up to some extent and this power is important, but its aim should not be
this prediction, but rather to have a better understanding of the world going from understanding of
interactions between individuals to interaction between different societies and cultures, and the
meaning behind all of this.
Bibliography
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History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and
Biomedical Sciences.
Martineau, Harriet. (Translation 1896). The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, Volumes I, II, and
III. London: Bell.
Elster, Jon. (2007). Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gorton, William A. (2010). The Philosophy of Social Science. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Rational Choice Theory. (n.d.) In Investopedia. Retrieved from
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rational-choice-theory.asp
Salmon, M. (1989). Explanation in the social sciences. Scientific Explanation; Minnesota Studies in
the Philosophy of Science, 13, p. 385-409.
Swartz, Norman. (2001). Laws of Nature. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Rosenberg, Alexander. (1988). The Philosophy of Social Science. (First edition). Boulder, CO:
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Papineau, David. Naturalism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2009 Edition), Edward
N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2009/entries/naturalism/>.