ABSTRACT
There are many arguments which purport to show that social scientific laws are impossible. Most often, these claims are made in terms of the intractability of the subject matter with which social scientists must contend. This chapter explores two of the most influential arguments that have been based on the claim that there is a difference in the subject matter of the social and natural sciences sufficient to guarantee the impossibility of laws that govern social phenomena. It examines the implications of the argument from complexity and the argument from openness for what they reveal about the possibility of social scientific laws. The argument from openness purports to be more comprehensive than the argument from complexity, and the barrier it provides to laws is allegedly more fundamental. The argument from openness is based on the idea that social scientific laws just do not exist because in social science people cannot have the closed systems necessary to support them.
