Social Science Under Debate: A Philosophical Pespective

Jay Newman is a professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph. He
is the author of Competition in Religious Life, Religion vs. Television:
Competitors in Cultural Context, and Inauthentic Culture and Its
Philosophical Critics.

Social Science Under Debate is the latest in a series of long academic
works by octogenarian philosopher of science Mario Bunge, who has been
affiliated with McGill University for three decades. In this
comprehensive analysis, Bunge tries to show that the “basic social
sciences” (sociology, positive economics, political science,
culturology, and history) and the primary forms of “sociotechnology”
(action theory, law, management technology, normative economics, and
policy design) have in recent years, and in some cases for longer, been
substantially vitiated by diverse forms of irrationalism, subjectivism,
relativism, and ideological dogmatism. Bunge sees philosophical analysis
as useful in exposing these recurrent hindrances to the systemism,
realism, and scientific method necessary for advancement in the social
sciences. He offers concise summaries of his own methodological
standpoint in several places (notably the preface and final section),
and this standpoint animates his attacks on an extraordinarily wide
variety of methodologies that have been adopted in specific social
sciences and sociotechnologies. The book also includes a provocative but
useful introductory chapter on the relation of social science to natural
science, some unnecessary appendixes, and a lengthy bibliography that
contains abundant references to the author’s other writings. It is
regrettable that Bunge does not offer us lengthier reflections on the
nature of philosophy or on the relation of social science to the
humanities.

Bunge is an articulate and lively writer with a heartfelt devotion to
rationality and authentic science, and he makes a good number of shrewd
observations in the process of puncturing various faddish approaches
that have in fact undermined authentically scientific thinking and
research in the social sciences. Unfortunately, many of Bunge’s
scattered critical forays are misguided, owing either to his
misunderstanding or oversimplification of genuinely sophisticated
theories or to his dogged dedication to his own dogmatic assumptions. At
its most impressive, this volume is reminiscent of Morris Raphael
Cohen’s Reason and Nature; but Bunge’s own scientism, akin to the
positivism from which he endeavors to some extent to distance himself,
generally undervalues the distinctively human element in the human
sciences and in philosophy itself and cannot accommodate the powerful
insights of numerous perspectives that Bunge dismisses in a couple of
paragraphs.