ABSTRACT

The social sciences, by contrast, have been disenchanting marriage and other social relationships for almost two centuries. The social sciences disenchant the world by replacing the commonsense tangle of explanation and justification with empirically robust theory. In the last several decades, inquiry into social phenomena has been richly informed by evolutionary, neuroscientific, and cognitive theory. In the debate, naturalists hold that there is continuity between the social and the natural sciences. In the nineteenth and twentieth century's, the battle line in the naturalism-normativity war was drawn around the difference between the natural sciences and the social sciences. Turner's essay argues that social scientific explanations have rendered appeal to any transcendental norms, and in particular moral norms, superfluous in the explanation of human action. The epistemic dimension of the naturalism issue in the philosophy of the social sciences often focuses on questions of methodology.