Some Remarks on the Hard Core of Soft Sciences

Abstract

This tide is deliberately ironic and intended to provoke. Many scientists in the so-called "hard" sciences view social sciences as hardly sciences at all but rather, at best, as literary tracts that employ pseudo-arguments to express their authors' ideo-logical positions. Here, again, I caricature, but I am not personally outraged when people denounce as "pseudo-scientific" writings that contain an eclectic mix of the ideas of Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard and other authors who have been elevated through no desire of their own to the status of gurus of thought. Undeniably, the writings of certain authors often lack the facts to back their ideas, and draw conclusions without having put forward verifiable premises. Now, I would like to show that approaches and methods exist at the heart of social sciences that enable light to be cast on the logic by which different so-cieties function, and on the ways of thinking of the actors involved in the re-production and evolution of those societies. In brief, I would like to show that human history in all the diversity of its social and cultural systems does not elude "scientific" thought. Consequently, such thought is not confmed to discovering the patterns of organisation of animate and inanimate matter, of the natural world that surrounds human beings and that predates their exis-tence. The object of the social sciences is to reconstruct, if looking toward the past, or to discover, if directed toward the present, the logic of social relations and of the representations, ideas and values that characterise a particular form of society in a particular epoch. Reconstructing social and historical patterns of logic does not imply accepting as the definitive explanation the perceptions that the actors themselves had or have of these patterns of logic and of their place in their society. Still, there can be no analysis of the forms of social exis-tence developed during the history of human kind that fails to consider how individuals and groups living in a society perceive that society and their own place within it. Let us now turn to a discipline that I practise and am familiar with from the inside-social anthropology. This discipline has its origins in Western commercial, military, political and ideological expansion that began in the 16th century. During this expansion process, hundreds of differently organ-ised societies were discovered by Westerners and, in many cases, conquered M. Carrier et al. (eds.), Knowledge and the World: Challenges Beyond the Science Wars