ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the claim made by the physicalist—that even if laws are taken to be relevant, they cannot be given in terms of social science. It considers some views that: laws are irrelevant to the explanation of human behavior, whether they are available or not, and laws are relevant to the explanation of human action but are just not available at the level of "social scientific" inquiry. Physicalism, at base, is the idea that purely physical descriptions of human action can be derived by reducing "social" terms to their underlying neurophysiological counterparts, and that it is only these basic terms that admit of nomological explanation. The physicalist believes that the "natural kinds" used in social scientific inquiry are not the only ones available in the investigation of human action and are probably not the most efficacious in understanding it.
