ABSTRACT
This chapter evaluates the impact that complexity and openness, and their attendant difficulties, have on the practical considerations involved in formulating laws in social science. Michael Scriven has admitted that the complexity of social phenomena is due to their level of engagement. Despite the subtlety of Scriven's revitalized account of the argument from complexity he falls prey to one overarching and recurring error. He confuses the thesis that there can be no laws of social phenomena at one level of description, with the thesis that there can be no social scientific laws at all. The chapter examines the nature of some alleged barriers and the argument for the claim that the openness of human systems implies the impracticality, their failure to show this does not warrant dismissal of the argument from openness, as presented by Brian Fay, as an important one for the question of social scientific laws.
