Daniel Little — Social science or social studies?

This list of legitimate objects of empirical study in the social world, resulting in legitimate and evidence-based knowledge and explanation, can certainly be extended. And if being scientific means no more than conducting analysis of empirical phenomena based on observation, evidence, and causal inquiry, then we can reasonably say that it is possible to take a scientific attitude towards empirical problems like these.

But the hard question is whether there is more to social science than a fairly miscellaneous set of results that have emerged through study of questions like these. In particular, the natural sciences have aspired to formulating fundamental general theories that serve to systematize wide ranges of natural phenomena -- the theory of universal gravitation or the theory of evolution through natural selection, for example. The goal is to reduce the heterogeneity and diversity of natural phenomena to a few general theoretical hypotheses about the underlying reality of the natural world.

Are general theories like these possible in the social realm?….

Here is one possible answer to the question posed above, consistent with the points made here. Yes, social science is possible. But what social science consists in is an irreducible and pluralistic family of research methods, observations, explanatory hypotheses, and mid-level theories that permit only limited prediction and that cannot in principle serve to unify the social realm under a single set of theoretical hypotheses. There are no grand unifying theories in the social realm, only an open-ended set of theories of the middle range that can be used to probe and explain the social facts we can uncover through social and historical research.

In fact, to the extent that the ideas of contingency, heterogeneity, plasticity, and conjuncturality play the important role in the social world that I believe they do, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that there are very narrow limits to the degree to which we can aspire to systematic or theoretical explanation in the social realm. And this in turn suggests that we might better describe social inquiry as a set of discrete and diverse social studies rather than unified "social science". We might think of the domain of social knowledge better in analogy to the contents of a large and diverse tool box than in analogy to an orrery that predicts the "motions" of social structures over time.

Understanding Society
Social science or social studies?
Daniel Little | Chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, Professor of Philosophy at UM-Dearborn and Professor of Sociology at UM-Ann Arbor