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'Science' in the Social Sciences

11. Glossary of Terms

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GLOSSARY

Anomie

Classes of Explananda

Falsifiability

Nomological, Nomological Status

Positivism, Positivist

GLOSSARY

Anomie

In Emile Durkheim’s analysis of variations in rates of suicide, he appeals to the idea that such rates are related to the degree of social and normative integration of people into their communities or the wider society. A lack of such social integration is called ‘Anomic’ after the Greek “an” (without) and ‘nomos’ (law).

Classes of Explananda

This expression means: ‘types of things to be explained’. In studies of methodology, the terms explanans (Latin for: explanation) and explanandum (plural: explananda) (Latin for: that which is to be explained) are commonly used. In this text, the distinction is being strongly drawn between two distinctively differentiable types of phenomena to be explained: (1) human actions and practices and (2) social ‘states of affairs’. Since one can compute ‘rates’ for either explanandum, it is important not to conflate their logical differences. Thus, for example, a ‘rate of suicide’ is a rate of the occurrence over time of a type of human action (the act of intentional self-destruction). The ‘rate of mortality’ is a rate of occurrence of something (death) which is not an action but an event. The ‘rate of inflation’ is an index of a social ‘state of affairs’ (viz., the degree to which certain commodity prices are rising over a period of time), and so forth. The latter ‘rates’ are not ‘rates of the occurrence of human actions’, even though it can be argued that ‘inflation’ is a product of human actions and decisions of such variety, range and complexity as to defy independent treatment and aggregation, hence the explanation of a ‘rate of inflation’ will have a wholly different form and logical status to an explanation of a ‘rate of mortality’ which in turn will not resemble an explanation of a ‘rate of occurrence of a type of human action, such as a criminal act of type X, etc’.

Falsifiability

Sir Karl Popper’s well-known central criterion for characterizing an empirically-grounded proposition as a candidate for a scientific explanation as, indeed, ‘scientific’. Popper held a metaphysical view of induction and truth rather than a commonsensical, everyday conception, and so he argued that no scientific proposition can ever be conclusively verified (i.e., shown to be true), but he did believe that a genuine candidate for a scientific proposition must be supportable by some characterization of a method for how other investigators might attempt to demonstrate its falsity. Only such in-principle ‘falsifiable’ propositions ought to be permitted to enter the canon of a science.

Nomological, Nomological Status

For a proposition to be nomological is for it to express a universal law (again, from the Greek ‘nomos’, meaning ‘law’). An example of a nomological statement which is true would be: a falling body in a vacuum falls at 32 feet per second squared). The nomological status of a proposition is its relationship to a lawful statement in the context of a scientific investigation or scientific theory.

Positivism, Positivist

This term refers in this text to the idea that the study of human affairs in any of their trans-biological dimensions can only be accomplished, or can best be accomplished, by using principles of inquiry draw from other, established, natural sciences. Such principles can include the goal of lawful generalization, of causal explanation, of idealization of instances to facilitate generalizing typologies of phenomena, of measurement, and so on.

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