Social Sciences, The Existence Of The Law? - Naturalism And Anti-naturalistic Argument For Clues

Are there still laws in social science? It's a long-standing problem in the philosophy of social science. In this paper, I aim to defend the possibility of the existence of laws in social science. Thus, it is necessary to discuss the hindrances to this possibility caused by the complexity and the speciality of social science as well as the possible ways to remove the hindrances. The discussion spreads around the following three questions: (1) How many and what are the opinions argued against the existence of social laws? (2) What are arguments of those opinions and what is wrong in these arguments? (3) What are the roots of their mistakes and how to solve them? Around these 3 questions, the paper chooses respectively the representative delegates of different approaches: naturalism, antinaturalism, and pluralism. In this process, I focus on refuting the arguments which believe social laws are either impossible, impractical, or ungainable. Finally, I aim to find a way to mitigate those arguments: to weaken the concept of laws to unify laws and rules, and by this way do I want to support the coexistence of different methodologies.This paper has five parts. Part one simply introduces two basic concepts in social science and different approaches to the possibility of the existence of social laws. Part two briefly introduces the discussion about laws in the philosophy of science, and mainly analyses its logic and its difficulties. Then explicates the study of naturalism to the possibility of the existence of social laws through the analysis around Hempel's covering-law theory. This part focuses on naturalism's difficulties and the origin of these difficulties. Part three concisely introduces the antinaturalism's animadversion to Hempel's arguments, especially consulting the disagreements of Winch and mainly analyzing their difficulties and the origin of these difficulties with the defending of Kincaid. Part four, based on the opinions oftwo famous pluralists------Weber and Davidson, at the dimension of analyticphilosophy, I give a new advice on unifying these three approaches and to explicate the rationality of my advice. In part five, I briefly narrate my thought of explanation in social science.