ABSTRACT
Liah Greenfeld has nailed up five challenging theses about the social sciences on the highly visible virtual doors—the websites—of Boston University. Theses 2 and 3 castigate the social sciences for taking physics as their scientific model, and for organizing disciplines around political and ideological concerns. The remaining theses read as follows:
Even though the human sciences were meant to study humanity, they focus on social structures, which, far from being distinctively human, are essential in the lives of all animals, hence are best addressed by biology. What separates humanity from the rest of the animal kingdom is not society or social structures, but the transmission of social order via symbolic means, i.e., culture, rather than by genes. Symbolic or cultural processes take place primarily in people’s minds. Instead of being unconscious subdisciplines of biology, the social sciences should be sciences of culture and the mind.
Quantification and mathematical modeling, applied to the study of social “structures,” tended to treat them as if they evolved mechanically. Mental reality, in turn—i.e., the meaning that people assign to their actions—was postulated to be a mere reflection of these structural processes, and therefore was grossly under-researched.
The problems of this paradigm are seen in the failure of social-scientific predictions, and the inability of social science to provide useful solutions to social problems. It is also reflected in the fact that, while sophomores in physics have left Newton far behind, the writings of Weber, Durkheim, even Plato and Aristotle, often seem more adequate than many contemporary social-scientific studies for understanding the world in which we live (Friedman 2004: 144–45; see also BU 2004).
