Philosophy of Science and Social Science (NP 101 or 102)

The purpose of this subject is to enable you to study topics in the philosophy of science in general, and topics in the philosophy of social science in particular.

In the broadest sense the philosophy of science is concerned with the theory of knowledge and with associated questions in metaphysics. What is distinctive about the field is the focus on “scientific” knowledge, and metaphysical questions - concerning space, time, causation, probability, possibility, necessity, realism and idealism - that follow in their train. As such it is concerned with distinctive traits of science: testability, objectivity, scientific explanation, and the nature of scientific theories.

Whether economics, sociology, and political science are “really” sciences is a question that lay people as well as philosophers have often asked. The technology spawned by the physical sciences is more impressive than that based on the social sciences: bridges do not collapse and aeroplanes do not fall from the sky, but no government can reliably control crime, divorce, or unemployment, or make its citizens happy at will. Human behaviour often seems less predictable, and less explicable than that of inanimate nature and non-human animals, even though most of us believe that we know what we are doing and why. So philosophers of social science have asked whether human action is to be explained causally or non-causally, whether predictions are self-refuting, whether we can only explain behaviour that is in some sense rational - and if so, what that sense is. Other central issues include social relativism, the role of ideology, value-neutrality, and the relationship between the particular social sciences, in particular whether economics provides a model for other social science. Finally, some critics have asked whether a technological view of ‘social control’ does not threaten democratic politics as usually understood.

Martin Hollis, The Philosophy of Social Science (Cambridge); Alexander Rosenberg, Philosophy of Social Science (Westview).