Originally Posted by peter12
He is correct, and he is confirming the strong criticisms that have been directed towards the institutional social sciences over the past half-century.
The philosopher-novelist, Walker Percy, described humans as triadic creatures - that is, sign-bearing and symbolizing. This perspective of man, borrowing from semiotic philosophy and Catholic Theology, criticizes the dyadic model (cause and effect) as it is applied to human selves. The methodology of the social sciences was directly borrowed from the natural sciences, and no matter how ramshackle the overall fit, the social sciences overturned and asserted itself over much older anthropologies, such as Greek rationalism or Christian humanism. This victory, in the academy anyway, was near absolute as social scientists could claim scientific objectivity in their empiricism, whereas the older empiricisms centred directly around theorizing about the self, and its purpose through the actual experience of the theorist, and his conversations with other people. The older empiricisms suffered from a lack of generality for the particularity, but in that way, probably captured a more accurate perspective of the human experience.
The problem, as Walker Percy, claims is that human beings possess too little self knowledge for objective experiments. The scientists conducting the experiments are not independent and autonomous brains orbiting, and monitoring the lives of the lesser subjects being experimented upon, but are more or less the same. The generalities arrived upon by social science cannot be replicated because of the artificiality of the circumstances in which they are conducted.
The pretense of the social scientist suffers from a total dislocation from the truth - that is, what is the self, and what is it here to do. The problem is, from the humanities perspective, is that we are probably nowhere near the truth than Plato was over 2500 years ago.
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