Eleonora Montuschi

Should We Still Compare the Social Sciences to the Natural Sciences

The history of the social sciences is replete with attempts at trying to imitate, more or less successfully, the methods, logic and techniques of the natural sciences – or at least to comply with what a certain image of the natural sciences had established to be the paradigm for science. Do such attempts still make sense in the present arena? What do old attempts tell us about the status of the sciences of the social and their specific methodological / ontological / epistemological aspects? In this article it is argued that if a comparative strategy were to maintain a function, it should be not to single out what is missing from social science in order to qualify as “science.” It should rather point out what and how specific features of the social world qualify for a scientifically domain-conscious type of analysis.

Rethinking Objectivity in Social Science

By presenting a number of concrete examples, this paper aims at soliciting a reflection on how social phenomena become the ‘objects of a science’ by being classified in specific ways, to answer specific questions, in different social sciences. This is in view of arguing that the objectivity of the procedures by which social scientific objects are identified and classified can only be assessed in relation to the actual questions addressed and formulated about these objects – rather than by referring back to some ideal standard or protocol of objective inquiry. This also goes against the practice, often endorsed by social scientific literature, of fixing a model for what social objects are to be like (scientific or philosophical, under some description or other) and the distortingly ‘normative’ idea of social scientific objectivity which derives from such practice. The objects of social scientific inquiry are complex in a specific sense, and a plural identification of those objects in the context of the widest array of methods of description, classification and analysis is to be pursued.

There Is "Noise," and Noise

What is noise? Common sense tells us it is a disturbance, an invasion of our perceptual space, a nuisance. But this is only part of a more complex story that the sciences and modern technologies might help us unravel. ‘Noise’ has a contextual meaning, but it also points at something ‘in nature’ (or in society)—and something that might also have a function and/or beneficial effects. In this article I show that what is categorized as ‘noise’ is there not necessarily to be removed or to be dispensed with, but to be used and taken advantage of.1

Application of Models from Social Science to Social Policy

The use of models in social science is now widely acknowledged, and well beyond cosmetic or illustrative purposes. However, the details and the mechanics of their use still prove hard to pin down. Equally, the usefulness of social scientific models in social practice and intervention is often challenged by a number of contentious and recurrent issues. One of these issues is ontological: How do model descriptions and aspects of social reality relate to each other? Often the descriptions offered by models are thin and unrealistic. Can we (and how much) learn about what goes on in the real-social world by analyzing the way/s that world gets described or explained by a model? A second issue is methodological: why using models when we can design experiments in the social world that are able, with some rigor, to inform us on what works? Nowadays there is an established trend to prefer the results achieved, for example, by well-conducted randomized control trials, by many considered the golden rule to doing good and useful social science.