2021-09-21 | Are social sciences worth a distinct epistemology?

Interesting debate among French sociologists Bernard Lahire @BernardLahire and Jean-Louis Fabiani @FabianiLouis in AOC on the unity of the social science and its epistemology. Here: https://aoc.media/analyse/2021/09/08/une-science-sociale-en-reponse-amicale-a-bernard-lahire/ and https://aoc.media/analyse/2021/09/08/une-science-sociale-en-reponse-amicale-a-bernard-lahire/ 1/N

B. Lahire voices in favor of the unity of the social science as a whole (including cognitive science and evolutionary biology) and insists that social science should not give up on nomology: determining the universal scientific laws governing social facts. 2/N

.L. Fabiani answers in a Passeronian way by mentioning the irreducible diversity of the social sciences and the fact they have a distinct epistemology because they deal with fundamentally historic objects. A statement is always spatio-temporally dependent. 3/N

As I was asked to teach 101 epistemology (with absolutely no skills), here's my take with a provocative question... 4/N

Should the study of dinosaur's extinction and that of the fall of the roman empire require different epistemologies? 5/N

No ! 6/N

If my understanding of pop cosmogony is correct, almost all (and maybe all) scientific "laws" only produce determinations of "historical" objects: they are conditional to the unfolding of our universe since the big bang and might not hold in alteranative universes. 7/N

So there's no ontological differences between producing determinations in both areas. (Maybe degrees of generality might differ. But it does not matter so much) 8/N

Probably, the concept of law is misleading by pushing too much the idea of eternal and spatially unbounded determinism. 9/N

If we accept the idea that empirical science is producing explanations of things under a certain set of scope conditions, no big differences in the end between natural and social sciences. (totally Anti-Passeron here) N/N