Social science understanding

While understanding chemical reactions is a necessary first step, integrating knowledge of reactions with knowledge of sources, sinks, and transport of chemicals is also necessary. In addition to this "hard science understanding, there is also the need to incorporate social science understanding of human use or abuse of our environmental resources. 

A partition of the process of understanding a eomplex phenomenon into three steps has been supported and justified by Runcimaim [12] for social sciences. The definitions done by Runcimarm cannot be directly translated into our field, nor the names he seleeted for the sequence of levels, but his scheme, presented here in a modified form, gives a eontribution to appreciate the strategy and the impact of specific works of research. 

An earlier version of this chapter was read at a colloquium on Irrationality Explanation and Understanding held in Paris at the Maison dee Sciences de . That paper was published in Social Science Information (1980) 19,6.1 am grateful to the members of that colloquium, and especially to Sissela Bok, for suggestions and comments. 

NRC (1996) Understanding risk Informing decisions in a democratic society. Committee on Risk Characterization, Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, National Research Council. Washington, DC, National Academy Press... 

Factor analysis. It is a truism that any observation may be a compound of several factors. In analysis one often seeks to hold all but one factor constant and measure the one against some standard.- This approach has much to commend it a result is obtained and the complexities involved in complete understanding of the system are avoided. In other disciplines it has not proven so easy to avoid the complications e.g. in psychology and social science the relative importance of hereditary and environmental characteristics or the relationship between race and intelligence are matters of controversey, and so the field of factor analysis has been developed. The objective is to extract from the data available, the number of independent factors present and their relative importance. 

So I went over to the University of Michigan, to their social science school, and got a social psychologist to come in the classroom to evaluate me and tell me what I am doing wrong. I could then understand what I need to do better to help these kids, if the problem was me. 

Albert O. Hirschman, "The Search for Paradigms as a Hindrance to Understanding," World Politics 22 (April 1970) 239. Elsewhere Hirschman takes social science in general to task in much the same fashion "But after so many failed prophecies, is it not in the interest of social science to embrace complexity, be it at some sacrifice of its claim to predictive power ("Rival Interpretations of Market Society Civilizing, Destructive, or Feeble Journal of Economic Literature 20 [December 1982] 1463-84). 

As I reached this conclusion 1 discovered that it had been anticipated by Nancy Cartwright s claim that "the laws of physics lie " Hence the resort to explanation by mechanism in the social sciences may not be due to their less developed state or to the complexity of their subject matter, but to more general facts about human understanding or about the world. The following passage will convey some of the flavor of Cartwright s argument ... 

A. Schutz, Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences in F. Dallmayr and T. McCarthy (eds), Understanding and Social Inquiry (1954 Notre Dame, IN and London University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), pp. 225-39, p. 236. 

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