Historical Foundations ASA 2017

Historical Foundations of the Social Sciences

American Sociological Association
Montreal, 2017

Paper draft (PDF)
Slides (PDF)

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hi, Dr. Little, thanks for sharing these papers, I u=inavriably enjoy reading yours. I am sharing my take about one of your conclusions (in your paper 'Historical Foundations ASA 2017'): you say Historical Social Science is not "comprehensive, predictive, or verifiable." My take is that the first two claims (comprehensive/predictive) simply derive from the complexity of social phenomena, rather than some further reason(s) why Social Science isn't 'scientific'. I would argue that Social Science IS in principle (increasingly) comprehensive (or unifiable), save perhaps its complexity and evolving-through-time character; Social Science is also predictive, save contingency/agency and again its evolving character-it is nevertheless predictive 'probabilistically,' allowing reasonable guesses within some model). I also think Social Science is verifiable: not in terms of RCTs (you mentioned reproducible/repeatable data sets) but in terms of peer review transparency, attaining a certain degree of consensus in a Popper-like process, within a community of inquiry.