Symposium I: What is a Social Science?
Anna Alexandrova (Cambridge) & Kareem Khalifa (UCLA)

2025 Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association

University of Glasgow (Cogito Epistemology Research Centre)

11 - 13 July 2025

Symposium I –What is social science?

Alexandrova

Anna Alexandrova

Cambridge

Khalifa

Kareem Khalifa 

UCLA

Getting the Methodenstreit Right 

Abstracts

What sort of inquiry is social science? This question used to preoccupy philosophers but fell off their agenda due to a stalemate between so-called naturalists, who took the ideal to be natural science, and exceptionalists, who allied social sciences with humanities. I show that both positions commit the error of contrastivism, namely defining social science in contrast to these two traditions, which inevitably ends up caricaturing and essentialising them. Using recent advances in social epistemology and political theory, I formulate constructivism about social sciences, a view that denies an essence to this inquiry and grounds it in the needs of communities to understand and improve themselves.

Should the social sciences should emulate the natural sciences or humanities? While once a lively topic in the philosophy of social science, interest in this question has waned in recent decades, in no small part because attempts to answer it have appeared futile. I argue that this futility stems largely from insufficient appreciation of the empirical questions that any defensible position in this debate must confront. By bringing these empirical considerations into sharper relief, the debate can be fruitfully reframed. I contrast my empirical approach with Alexandrova’s constructivist alternative.

About

Anna Alexandrova is a Professor in Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King’s College Cambridge. She researches how formal tools such as models and indicators enable scientists to navigate complex phenomena tinged with ethical and political dimensions. Her book A Philosophy for the Science of Wellbeing came out with Oxford University Press in 2017 and won the 2022 Gittler Book Prize of the American Philosophical Association. She previously taught at the University of Missouri St Louis and received her PhD at the University of California San Diego. She was born and brought up in a southern Russian city of Krasnodar.

Kareem Khalifa is Professor of Philosophy at University of California, Los Angeles. He works in the philosophy of social science, general philosophy of science, and epistemology, with special focus on understanding, explanation, modelling, and inquiry. He is currently working on a book about race in the social sciences. In 2017, he authored Understanding, Explanation, and Scientific Knowledge and in 2022, he co-edited, with Insa Lawler and Elay Shech, Scientific Understanding and Reprsentation: Modeling in the Physical Sciences.

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