Conclusion

This essay has taken on a large subject: what is involved in understanding society? What sorts of ontological assumptions do we need to make as we attempt to analyze and explain social processes? What is involved in arriving at an explanation of a social outcome or pattern? How do we provide empirical confirmation for our hypotheses and theories about the social world? And what help or hindrance can be derived from the legacies of positivism and naturalism? How can philosophy contribute to the creation of a better sociology for the twenty-first century?

We began by noticing that this inquiry is not of merely academic concern.

Understanding society better is an urgent need for all of us in the twenty-first century. Our quality of life, our physical security, our ability to provide for greater social justice globally and locally, and our ability to achieve the sustainability of our natural environment all depend upon social processes and social behavior. The better we understand these processes and behavior, the better we will be able to shape our futures in ways that serve our needs and values. And currently our understanding of important social processes is highly limited. We need better theories, better research methodologies, and better conceptions of the basic nature of social phenomena, if we are to arrive at a more realistic understanding of the social world. The philosophy of social science can contribute to these important tasks.

Three particularly central ideas emerge from the considerations presented above. First is a point about social ontology. Social research should be based on a realistic understanding of the fact that social phenomena are constituted by socially embedded individuals in interaction with each other. Higher-level social entities - states, organizations, institutions - are real enough, but they must be understood as being composed of individuals in interaction.

So social science must avoid the error of reification - the assumption that social entities have some kind of abiding permanence independent of the individuals who constitute them.

This ontology should in turn lead social researchers to expect a substantial degree of contingency and plasticity in the phenomena they study. Given that institutions and organizations are constituted by the social individuals who make up the institution or organization, we should expect that they will mutate over time - that is, we should expect plasticity of social entities. And we should anticipate contingency. Rather than the iron laws of history that Marx hoped to find, we should understand that social outcomes depend upon many independent factors, and that outcomes will be pathdependent and contingent. This means, further, that we should not expect to find law-governed regularities among social phenomena, and we should not define “science” as the discovery of law-governed regularities among a set of phenomena.

Finally, it has been argued here that there is a credible basis for finding a degree of order among social phenomena, in the form of causal relationships between various social facts. The discovery of social causal mechanisms is the foundation of social explanation. Moreover, there is a very consistent relationship between the idea of a social causal mechanism and the social ontology of “socially situated individuals” that was developed above. Social causation flows through the structured social actions of individuals. And empirical social research can inform us about various aspects of the processes of social causation: the social institutions within which individuals act; the historical processes of development through which individuals came to have their mental models; moral ideas, and preferences; and the powers and constraints that are embodied in a set of social relationships at a given time.

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Source: Allhoff F.. Philosophies of the Sciences: A Guide. N.-Y.: Wiley-Blackwell,2010. — 386 p.. 2010

Conclusion

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