First published in 1986. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This is an expanded and thoroughly revised edition of the widely adopted introduction to the philosophical foundations of the human sciences. Ranging from cultural anthropology to mathematical economics, Alexander Rosenberg leads the reader through behaviorism, naturalism, interpretativism about human action, and macrosocial scientific perspectives, illuminating the motivation and strategy of each.Rewritten throughout to increase accessibility, this new edition retains the remarkable achievement of revealing the social sciences’ enduring relation to the fundamental problems of philosophy. It includes new discussions of positivism, (...) European philosophy of history, causation, statistical laws, quantitative models, and postempiricist social science, along with a completely updated literature guide that keys chapters to widely anthologized papers. (shrink)

I defend the prospect of good science in the social sciences by looking at the obstacles to social laws. I criticize traditional approaches, which rule for or against social laws on primarily conceptual grounds, and argue that only a close analysis of actual empirical research can decide the issue. To that end, I focus on problems caused by the ceteris paribus nature of social generalizations, outline a variety of ways those problems might be handled, and then examine in detail the (...) work of Paige on agrarian revolutions. Paige's work, I argue, handles its problems roughly as well as does some of the best work in evolutionary biology. The upshot is that some social laws can be relatively well confirmed. (shrink)

This article defends laws in the social sciences. Arguments against social laws are considered and rejected based on the "open" nature of social theory, the multiple realizability of social predicates, the macro and/or teleological nature of social laws, and the inadequacies of belief-desire psychology. The more serious problem that social laws are usually qualified ceteris paribus is then considered. How the natural sciences handle ceteris paribus laws is discussed and it is argued that such procedures are possible in the social (...) sciences. The article ends by arguing that at least some social research is roughly as well as confirmed as good work in evolutionary biology and ecology. (shrink)

Many philosophers have asserted that evolutionary theory is unfalsifiable. In this paper I refute these assertions by detailing some falsifiable predictions of the theory and the evidence used to test them. I then analyze both these predictions and evidence cited to support assertions of unfalsifiability in order to show both what type of predictions are possible and why it has been so difficult to spot them. The conclusion is that the apparent logical peculiarity of evolutionary theory is not a property (...) of evolutionary theory; it is a property of our human-sized perspective on evolutionary theory. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I defend the role of nomological explanation in the social sciences by showing that the arguments against social scientific laws fail to demonstrate either their impossibility or impracticality, or the irrelevance of laws to the explanation of human behavior. ;The two strongest arguments against social scientific laws--based on such alleged intractability--are the argument from complexity and the argument from open systems. My attack on these has two parts: First, I demonstrate that there are conceptual flaws internal to (...) both of these arguments--that there is no coherent account of them that can justify abandonment of the nomological ideal in social scientific inquiry. Second, I provide reasons for thinking that the project of law-like explanation is worthwhile. Here I support the idea that we want and can have social scientific laws by exploring an analogy with evolutionary biology, in an attempt to show that natural scientific fields have also faced formidable barriers produced by their subject matter, and have yet retained nomological explanations. This analogy has not been fully recognized, I claim, because those who have criticized attempts to formulate social scientific laws are laboring under a naive and highly idealized conception of the role which laws play in the natural sciences, and the conditions under which they have been produced. Upon a proper view of natural scientific practice--which emphasizes the important role of redescription and theory development in aiding the search for laws--we see more continuity across subject matter, and methodology, than has been allowed by the critics of laws in social science. ;Finally, I show that the arguments against the relevance of social scientific laws are based on a narrow view of what it is that we want explained about human behavior, and do not warrant the abandonment of the nomological ideal in social scientific inquiry. I thereby uphold the prospects for lawlike explanation in social science despite the limitations imposed by its subject matter, and give reasons for remaining optimistic about its chances of overcoming them. (shrink)

The contrast between man's amazing ability to manipulate his world and his pitiful incompetence in managing his own affairs is now as commonplace as it is tragic. It is by rigorous devotion to scientific method that we have made our conquests over the material environment; it is obvious that this method is not normally applied to the field of relations of human beings, individual and collective. These are conducted in a quite different way, governed by a medley of primitive impulses (...) set in a framework of a traditional morality that varies from place to place and age to age. In these matters science plays little part; yet more than a century has passed since Auguste Comte said that the rational reform of society must be brought about by the application of scientific method to social problems. It is, therefore, the first purpose of this essay to ask how far social problems might be tackled by the methods of science. (shrink)

Although largely conceptual, the book is an unequivocal defense of this new theory in the explanation of human behavior.

When, in recent years, philosophers of science attend to the physical sciences, their activity centers on the analysis and clarification of the methods and theories of these sciences. Thus philosophers have made remarkable contributions to our understanding of mechanics, the relativity theory, the quantum theory, probability, and geometry, as well as to the foundations of mathematics. More general discussions about theory construction, explanation, and concept formation always are illustrated and illuminated by reference to specific theories within science. In our generation, (...) most philosophers of science have taken for granted that physical science is descriptive, empirical, functional, and—leaving aside controversial interpretations of quanta—deterministic. (shrink)

Many philosophers have claimed that the structure of evolutionary theory is intrinsically different from the structure of physical theories. These claims were based on the appearance of the immature structure of the theory. Refutations of these claims have been based on newly available glimpses of the mature structure of the theory. These claims and their refutations show that the relationship between the immature and mature structures of evolutionary theory is dramatically different from this relationship for Newtonian physics. Analysis of the (...) cause of this difference provides insight into significant features of the process of maturation of scientific theories. (shrink)