The imperfect empiricism of the social sciences

The social sciences suffer from a methodological false consciousness that calls into question their progressive nature as cumulative, knowledge-building enterprises. While the practioners of social science believe that they accumulate knowledge through a classical scientific dialectic of hypothesis and evidence (scientific empiricism), they in fact assume their hypotheses to be true images of the nature of the social world, and they resist evidence that gainsays these images (imperfect empiricism). The idea that the social sciences progress, in a linear or dialectical fashion, is itself derived from the perspective of scientific empiricism. In reality the progress of the social sciences is problematic, if the movement of these sciences is viewed in terms of their actual practice of imperfect empiricism. Seen from the latter perspective, the social sciences are—at any particular moment in time—an aggregate of conceptual communities that communicate only imperfectly with each other and that assert the correctness of their point of view while disdaining that of the others. Since the progressive advance of knowledge is uncertain in these circumstances, the question is raised as to why the natural sciences that—according to Kuhn—are also practioners of imperfect empiricism work, while the social sciences apparently do not.