How Scientific is Social Science?
After a period of latency, the philosophy of social science is beginning to reappear as a vibrant and expanding field of philosophical inquiry. Interestingly enough, some of the new contenders are not professionally either social scientists or philosophers of social science. To name a couple of the more renowned recruits, one may think of Edward O. Wilson and Stephen J. Gould. Yet, the central question that permeates a significant part of their recent exchanges, as well as of others, is the unremitting concern over the relationship of the social sciences to the natural sciences. Wilson, though lauding the recent advances especially in economics in establishing firmer naturalistic foundations, laments the endemic failure of social scientists to forge “consilient” chains of connection with natural science. Whereas Gould has been chiding unificationist approaches like Wilson for ignoring the “emergent” and “contingent” characteristics of the phenomena in the social domains, thereby compro
