Abstract

Methodological debate in the social sciences has long been polarized by advocates of naturalistic and interpretive methods. This has obscured two central features of the social sciences. First, they are pursued primarily to achieve practically relevant causal knowledge of human activity. Second, very few explanations of social phenomena that employ causal models command the consensus of reasonable practitioners. This thesis, then, has two goals: to provide an explanation for the seemingly interminable contentiousness, and to describe a more reasonable philosophy of the methods and status of the social sciences. ;The argument begins with an analysis of causal laws in the physical sciences. It is argued that no equivalent laws exist in the social sciences. Claims that the social sciences have statistical laws or substantive 'ceteris paribus' laws are rejected. It is then urged that frequentistic considerations for the identification of causes in social science coexist and compete with interests in intervention and in the attribution of responsibility. These interests, which arise from our self understanding as agents with normative commitments, influence the selection of causes. When conjoined with the variability that is a consequence of another feature of agency---the ability of agents to learn from, respond to, and creatively adapt their environments---these interests and commitments prevent the uncontentious confirmation of causal models. At the end, an effort is made to articulate the idea that the social sciences should be viewed as instrumental practical sciences. Comparisons are drawn with the Aristotelian conception of practical science from which the present view was inspired, and distinctive features of the new view are sketched