Dear colleagues,
Many academic disciplines constitute the category of social science, and those disciplines have many branches. Keeping this caveat in mind I will make a couple of sweeping generalizations.
First, explanations in the natural sciences, especially physics and chemistry, offer laws that are deterministic. The social sciences offer very few if any law-like explanations (see part 1 in Elster, 2015, pp. 1-53). For example, the economic ‘law’ of demand only specifies a relation e.g. when the price of a good goes up, consumers buy less. In contrast, Newton’s law of gravitation specifies a relation and its magnitude e.g. as the distance between two objects increases the attractive force between them decreases inversely with the square of the distance. Explanations in social science are considered to be 'weak' because they are not precise enough to definitively resolve conflicting accounts of many social phenomena.
Second, explanations in social science tend to be of the many-to-many or one-to-many kind, so statistical methods are useful since they help to identify general patterns of events. Social science explanations are a bit like proverbs, they can help to indicate a possible underlying mechanism e.g. 'if ain't broke, don't fix it' or 'haste makes waste' or 'form follows function'. Explanations in natural science tend to be of the one-to-one or one-to-many kind e.g. 'this happens between this object and that object by this much'.
There are some pretty ok courses available online that survey some of the main social theories. Iván Szelényi's lectures provide a light introduction to modern social theories with some interesting commentary on their historical contexts, you can watch the videos here https://oyc.yale.edu/sociology/socy-151
Jon Elster's work on philosophy of social science is useful, especially if you are more inclined towards methodological individualism.
Elster, Jon. (2015). Explaining Social Behaviour. Revised edition. Cambridge University Press: UK
Best wishes,
Luke
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