Dialectic as a General Method of Social Science: Varieties of Social Science Experience

Abstract

There can be little doubt that what we have come to call scientific method has undergone significant transformation and development in this century and the last. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the social sciences. If the essence of method be identified with control, quantification, and measurement, then the ability of the social sciences to achieve these aims and thereby presumably to obtain method has increased considerably and continues to grow significantly. One of the basic theses of this chapter is that the social sciences are on the verge of a new and different type of revolution and development in method.

The hard and fast impassible line which is supposed by some to exist between ‘emotive’ and ‘scientific’ language is a reflex of the gap which now exists between the intellectual and the emotional in human relations and activities. The split which exists in present social life between ideas that have scientific warrant and uncontrolled emotions that dominate practice, the split between the affectional and the cognitive, is probably one of the chief sources of the maladjustments and unendurable strains from which the world is suffering. John Dewey (1939)