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The purpose of this paper is to characterize a dichotomous view of the current situation in the sciences of man and show it to be fallacious. On the view to be rejected, the sciences of man are undergoing the first serious attempt in history to thoroughly naturalize their subject matter and thus to put an end to their separate status. Progress has (on this view) been quite considerable in the disciplines in charge of the individual, while in the social sciences the outcome of the process is moot: the naturalistic social sciences are still in their infancy, and whether they will eventually engulf or at least profoundly transform the field of social science is unclear. The dichotomous conception pits two camps against one another. On the one hand, the advocates of the naturalistic social sciences maintain that they hold the key to the long-awaited realization of the unity of science program and are set to put the social sciences on equal footing with the natural sciences as we know them today. On the other, the mainstream in social science is strongly opposed to the very idea of naturalizing the field. The impartial observer is then asked to wait and see: either the current attempts at naturalization succeed, and the goals of unified science are attained; or they fail, in which case the prospect of developing a social science which is truly scientific recedes in the distant future. But this view is based on too narrow a concept of science, and thus fails to do justice to the situation, or so I"ll argue.

DOI: 10.1007/978-90-481-3263-8_1

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