A Critique of Methodological Reason

Abstract

American social science has always been preoccupied with methodology. In the last twenty-five years, however, it has become a near obsession. While questions around method have always been a concern of the human sciences, twentieth-century U.S. social science is, for the most part, unique in its desire to use methodology as natural science does, to ground its claims to truth. Although social inquiry always employs various techniques—statistical, historical, ethnographic, for example—the effort to emulate what many consider the rigorous methodologies of the natural sciences continues within sociology, psychology, and other disciplines in the human sciences. Arguably the tendency toward privileging methodology is a symptom of the insecurity shared by most branches of the human sciences about the scientific status of their findings. In the tradition of Karl Popper (1934), many in the social sciences have concluded that the task of the social sciences is to construct an exact science of humans and their societies incrementally, strictly eschewing meta-theory. The motto is that science cannot ask a question for which an algorithm or technique is not available for its answer.