ABSTRACT
The “demarcation problem” in the Philosophy of Science usually refers to the question, made most prominent by Popper, as to what essentially distinguishes science from other activities. Popper’s main focus was physics, and his answer was falsification. But of course, the Philosophy of the Social Sciences has historically had its own version of a demarcation problem, namely, what, if anything, distinguishes the Natural Sciences from the Social Sciences. Traditionally, the background for this debate was the distinction between Erklären and Verstehen, with positivists claiming scientific hegemony for the latter and interpretivists/hermeneuticists defending the integrity of the former. But due to the demise of positivism and the rise of naturalism, this debate now seems outdated. Many naturalists now believe that even physicalism is passé and should be displaced by a more flexible methodological and even metaphysical pluralism (cf. Dupré, 1993 and Cartwright, 1999). Against the backdrop of a flexible, pluralist naturalism, it can be hard to see what interpretivists were ever upset about. For many years, John Dupré has offered powerful arguments for an anti-reductionist, pluralist naturalism in the Philosophy of Science. Dupré has recently taken his pluralist naturalism one step further, arguing that there is no in-principle difference between the languages of science and ordinary language. By developing a distinction between “theoretical holism” and “practical holism” introduced by Hubert Dreyfus many years ago, this chapter argues that naturalists like Dupré miss a philosophically important, though not metaphysical, distinction between the natural and social sciences.
