Are there in fact laws in the social sciences? We've heard, for example, of the law of supply and demand, but is it really a law? Does it always hold true? Or is that not necessary for a law?
Laws in the Social Sciences?
(4 posts) (3 voices)-
Posted 1 year ago #
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The history of pragmatism and its alliance with social science has been eminently political, and there is no reason to hope a non-politicized social science that can tell us exactly what the ideal social structure of society should be like. Even if it did, such a social science would be useless, because man is an eminently political animal, and my guess is that someone would develop an alternative model for another ideal society from which vantage point he could argue against this “presumably” perfect social science, simply because the realization of scientific utopia of perfectly allocated resources would be to boring and stale for people to withstand. Social Science, unlike Hegelians are prone to believe, cannot help us transcend the muddles of liberal politics. It might seem frustrating that in a liberal constitutional polity, there is no absolute, no ultimate unfolding of a dialectical process. There is only a dialogical process, the exchange of opinions and the give and take of political factions. Not unlike teleological methods of constitutional interpretation, social science suffers from the problem of human ignorance. Neo-classical economics is necessarily ideological, with the twist that it can be used by all sides of the ideological spectrum. Market failure economics can provide a pragmatic way of criticizing formalistic aspects of law that impede government solutions to social problems, just as rational choice theory can be deployed to criticize aspects of law that constrain individual choice, or emergence theory can be used to defend libertarian ideas of social organization. The problems of social science are also tied to the uncertainty of language. Even the meaning of “aspects that constrain choice” used by rational choice theory is open to wide interpretations. For example, recent studies in behavioral law and economics bring psychological accounts of human behavior to bear on neo-classical economics, arguably to improve the predictive power of economic models by drawing a more “realistic” account of human behavior, but also to use a classically free-market model in ways that allow paternalist regulation. But even assuming these behavioral insights are verifiably correct (empirically, according to the selected data) and can be adequately translated into the theoretical framework of neo-classical economics, the question of choice is fundamentally one of values, and behavioral determinism, like all determinisms, stands on nothing but an idealized fiction guiding a paradigm of research. The empirical selection of data is questionable, but so is the model: there is no objective criterion that can define what choices are “rational” or not “rational,” simply because there is no objective account of what optimum human rationality entails.
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Posted 2 months ago #
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