Philosophy of Social Science: Social Scientific Methodology

Catalog description

The philosophy of social science is both descriptive and prescriptive. It describes the philosophical assumptions that form the basis of social inquiry and its practices, and it criticizes them to secure their ability to explain and/or predict social phenomena. This seminar will focus, primarily, on social scientific methodology. The main goal of the seminar is to clarify our answers to the question: should social scientific methodology be different from the methodology employed in the 'hard' sciences? To answer this question, first, we will focus on economic methodology. We will assess topics such as: the epistemic virtues of economic models, whether macroeconomic models need microfoundations, ceteris paribus clauses, randomized control trials, etc. For the second part of the seminar, we will focus on the epistemic value of ethnographic research methods in Anthropology, which is fundamentally different from any method used in the natural (hard) sciences. Although the use of ethnographies has become more popular in the last decades, philosophers of science have failed to focus on their epistemic import. Because of this, we will ponder on questions such as: what type of knowledge is produced by ethnographies? Is this knowledge scientific enough? If not, what is lacking? If yes, should ethnographies be used in other scientific domains?