SOS 425 - Philosophy of Social Sciences

This course aims to introduce students to the ontological, epistemological, and methodological foundations of social scientific knowledge and to examine comparatively the principal approaches to understanding social reality. It explores the fundamental assumptions of naturalist and constructivist philosophies of science, their respective modes of explanation and interpretation, and the different functions they assign to research methods. The course enables students to recognize that methodological choices are not merely technical decisions but are grounded in particular conceptions of reality and knowledge, and to evaluate competing methodological approaches critically.

The course follows the chapter sequence of Jonathon W. Moses and Torbjørn L. Knutsen’s Ways of Knowing: Competing Methodologies in Social and Political Research. It begins with the relationships among ontology, epistemology, methodology, and method, and then examines the naturalist philosophy of science and experimental, statistical, comparative, historical, and case-based methods. The second part addresses critiques of naturalist methodology, constructivist philosophy of science, and interpretive uses of narrative, comparison, statistics, and experimentation. The course also introduces critical realism and critical naturalism through Roy Bhaskar’s The Possibility of Naturalism and concludes with a discussion of methodological bridge-building and pluralism.

Martin Slattery, Key Ideas in Sociology, Nelson Thornes, 2003