The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Science - The Department ...

Harold Kincaid
Problems to Come
Important future issues in the philosophy of the social sciences turn on developing
the naturalized empirical approach focusing on the actual practice of social
research. The previous section has already pointed out a number of unresolved
questions that will require a careful look at what social research actually shows. In
this section, I briefly survey other issues that arise from investigating and evaluating
the actual practice of social research.
Much interesting work in the philosophy of science has resulted from engagement
with social constructionist accounts of various episodes in the natural sciences.
Philosophy of social science could likewise profit from such an engagement,
though interestingly the sociologists of knowledge have not as often turned their
gaze on themselves. Here, the task is to identify the collective practices of social
research and to use that information in explaining and evaluating the social
sciences. Some interesting work in this direction has been done for economics
(McCloskey, 1985; Sent, 1997), on the behaviorial sciences (Longino, 1990;
Hacking, 1995), on the category of race (Root, 2000), on the status of social
science concepts in general (Dupré, 1993), and in feminist critiques of specific
social sciences (Wylie, 1996, 1997).
Pursuing such questions also naturally leads to investigating inference in the
social sciences – describing how and with what success social scientists move from
data to hypothesis. There are numerous issues of this sort where important work
is and/or needs to be done. Here are some examples:
• The extent to which various philosophical models of science fit the social sciences
Work has been done assessing how well bootstrapping models apply to archeology
(Wylie, 1986) and Lakatosian models to economics (Hands, 1993). A
variety of Bayesian analyses of the natural sciences have been produced, but
few for the social sciences. Given the central place of frequentist statistical
inference in the social sciences, they are a seemingly ripe area for such
investigation.
• Issues in causal modeling
There is an important literature – see Pearl (2000) for summary –
investigating the prospects for distinguishing causal models given correlational
data and other constraints inspired by work in artificial intelligence. While the
issues here are not specific to the social sciences, this work has important potential
implications for how causal models in the social sciences are evaluated.
• The force of simulation
Simulation is a growing practice in social research. Yet it presents numerous
puzzles concerning its point and force. Are simulations supposed to tell us how
the world works? If so, they raise the ceteris paribus problem in a new way.
When are simulations compelling evidence despite their unrealistic assumptions?
What other purposes than confirmation can they serve and how?
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