ABSTRACT
The question of whether inquiry in the social sciences is essentially of the same nature as that in the natural sciences may look at first sight a relatively straightforward one-as perhaps do the positions taken up in the various extracts given here. On this level, Mill, Easton and Hempel all basically advocate ‘the methodological unity of all empirical science’, as Hempel puts it. Lessnoff on the other hand queries this unity on the grounds that the study of people and their actions is radically different from the study of mindless matter. These represent two long-standing positions on the central question: first the empiricist view that the study of social and of natural phenomena are in principle the same, even while accepting that in practice ‘social science’ may not yet be as developed as the natural scienccs; and second the view that since the phenomena of nature and of human activity are fundamentally different, primarily because of the dimension of ‘meaning’ in human action, their study must correspondingly be different-a stand outlined by Lessnoff in this chapter and followed up further in chapter 7, particularly in reading 7.1.
