Joel Isaac: The Strange Sciences- Concepts, Facts, and a Forgotten Tradition in Modern Social Thought

Abstract:

The social sciences today are widely considered to be a branch of applied statistics, or, failing that, applied economics.  To be sure, so-called ‘qualitative’ approaches still persist, from hermeneutics to Marxism and poststructuralism.  But hyper-empiricism is where the action is.  In this paper, I argue that the quantitative revolution of recent decades has obscured a rival tradition of social inquiry.  Proponents of this alternative approach offered a deep critique of empiricism, and attempted to show that social inquiry cannot live by data alone.  In a nutshell, this alternative tradition sought to place conceptual analysis alongside factual investigation at the center of social research.  It sought to study logic – the science of argument and inference – as something that is necessarily in the world.

Short Bio:

Joel Isaac is an historian of philosophy and the social sciences, focusing in particular on American and British traditions of social thought. His first book Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), was awarded the Gladstone Prize by the Royal Historical Society, UK.  He is currently working on two books.  The first is a history of the relations between philosophy and the social sciences in the twentieth century.  It focuses on the emergence of an idea of social science as involving the study of concepts, and thus as in part an exercise in non-empirical investigation of social practices.  Central figures in this book include Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Maynard Keynes, John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, and Clifford Geertz.  The second book is a study of the political foundations of economic thought, with special attention paid to the origins of neoclassical economics.