| SOCIAL SCIENCE: DEVIL'S ALLIANCE?  [+ favourites]
The physicist Richard Feymman famously questioned the credibility of the social sciences, suggesting that they deal with phenomena too complex for the theories they fashion. Is this true? Surely not. Certainly physics and say, econmics, are very different. But neither are without a basis. The natrual sciences deal with relations, or rather, in Piaget's sense, structures (series' of transformations arranged in a hierarchy and unfiied by a given principle); whereas the social sciences are conversant with fixed THINGS which are simple in the sense of being non-divisible (ie people, or a trade union) but the causal relations of which remain out of sight, and only deducible ex post facto. As Hegel said, the owl of minerva spreads its wings at dusk. We can say, things are thus; a discrete state of affairs can be picked out, with whatever details are relevant to the description; but the relations between them remain quite obscure. The difference between the two sciences, then, can be encapsulated like so: physics is an upturned pyramid, the base of which is more complex and less fundmantal; everything we infer from the top we infer from below. Sociology, on the other hand, is like a stratum of rocks, frozen in time, none being priviliged or adducible from the other.
|
