Naturalism And Social Science

Why social science which is an important part of human knowledge does not show progress as natural science? Does social science have any external rational base in natural science? Responses to these questions constitute the most important task of the philosophy of social sciences, which leads to the dispute between naturalism and anti-naturalism in social science. This dissertation will analyze the relationship between naturalism and the development of social science, and at the same time examine the rationality and limitation of naturalism when it works in the process of systematizing the social science and examine what naturalism contributes to social science.What we call naturalism in this dissertation refers to a study tendency but not special group of philosophy. It means to oppose super-naturalism on ontology. It opposes any form of a priori knowledge and insists on experience sources on epistemology. Contrast to this, anti-naturalism strictly distinguishes between natural phenomenon and social phenomenon and establishes understanding as the most basic method of social science. Its reasonability lies in its breakthrough of the naturalism's simple dealing with social phenomenon and its exposure of a way of understanding for social science. Anti-naturalism promotes the development of social science. While social science provides a knowledge of domain for anti-naturalism.As we know, the appearance of social science and its systematization in great extent is because positivists hold a theory of naturalism contending there are no differences between the study of social science and the study of natural science and you should adopt the method of naturalism if you want to achieve any achievement. The reasonability of naturalism mainly lies in three aspects: First, it satisfies the requirement of modern science towards ontology; Second, it asserts that the basic requirement of social science is objectivity; The third, it supports social science with its methodology. But what we can not deny is its limitation is obvious at the same time. Strictly speaking, naturalism itself is the product of modem science which makes social science loss its rationality; and its insistence on empirical method ignores the complication of human society. In spite of those, I still hold that naturalism makes great contributions to the development of social science. These contributions mainly are: on one hand, it promotes the systematizing of social science; on the other hand, it causes the forming of the naturalist' studying paradigm in social science, which bases on the new understanding to the study on social science and contend that pursuing objective knowledge by scientific activities with value judgment is fit for human's reason and the progress of social science is beyond doubt.