It [social science] is what phrenology was in the early nineteenth century, and astrology and alchemy in the Middle Ages and the sixteenth century: the fashionable scientific fraud of the age.
RG Collingwood
EPISTEME: December 2023
2 days ago
2 comments:
I used to think that, too. But having gone through a political science department to get a political philosophy degree I saw fit to change my opinion. There really is a lot of useful social science being done, and social science can yield interesting data. Would you really say that economics is not worthy of studying? I don't believe it.
I also received my degree through a political science department, but what I saw there reinforced my skepticism about the rationality or relevance of social science.
In terms of economics, it has become the most scientific of the social sciences, and, thus, has little to say about human activity. It would be the most appropriate to study, not because one learns much about the way human beings actually think, but because economists have been most successful at avoiding the category confusions (history, science, or practice) which are regular features of sociology, political science, etc.
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