Realism in the Social Sciences: Social Kinds and Social Laws

Abstract

A general picture that informs many versions of scientific realism is this. The physical world exists independently of us. In one sense, of course, we physically embodied creatures are part of that world; but we do not create it, our thought and action do not sustain it, and there are structural features of it (‘the laws of nature’) that we can do nothing to alter. It contains things that we never will observe, that perhaps we could never observe, but about which we may come to have some rational beliefs by way of plausible scientific inference. The aim of science is to construct the theories of ever increasing truth-likeness about what the physical world, in both its observable and unobservable aspects, is like.