Criticism and Pragmatic Philosophy of Social Science

Abstract

A pragmatic social science offers a media res in relation to hermeneutical and critical theoretical models of social scientific inquiry that is more than the sum of these parts, methodologically speaking, because pragmatism wants to draw as well on other methods in social science, such as rational choice and functionalism as moments of a ‘scientific’ account of human action. That is, simply because the fixation of one aspect of humanaction is the rule in these schools, it does not vitiate their accounts and conclusionsentirely. They serve as hypotheses to be tested, and if fruitful revised in their meaning and consequences. By employing pragmatic social scientific inquiry in the spirit of those reforms attempted by interpretive and critical philosophy of social science, we make progress towards loosening the methodological habits of social science.

Keywords: pragmatism, philosophy of social science, critique, criticism, hermeneutics, interpretive social science, John Dewey, Jurgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, pluralism, imagination, publics, inquiry, democracy