Abstract
Few questions have the capacity to provoke as intense an emotional response among social scientists as that dealing with the utility of quantitative methods for explaining human/social behavior.1 On the one hand, there are those who argue that only through the application of quantitative measurements and methods can the social sciences ever hope to become ‘real’ sciences; on the other hand, there are those who claim that the subject matter of the social sciences is simply not amenable to quantification and all attempts to impose such measures and methods upon social behavior is just so much nonsense. What makes this situation somewhat puzzling is that in most cases, each side presents the opposing side, or at least the more sophisticated spokesmen for the other side, in what can only be called caricature form.
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Notes
In addition to Aaron Cicourel’s Method and Measurement in Sociology (New York: Free Press, 1964) see collection by Daniel Lerner and Harold Lasswell The Policy Sciences (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959).
See Roy Bhaskar’s A Realist Theory of Science (Leeds: Harvester, 1975) and The Possibility of Naturalism (Brighton: Harvester, 1979).
See ‘On the Sociology of Mind’ by Charles W. Smith in Paul Secord’s Explaining Human Behavior ( Beverly Hills: Sage Publication, 1982 ).
George Herbert Mead’s Mind, Self and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934) remains the classic formulation of this position. For a more recent formulation see the Introduction of Anthony Giddens’ New Rules of Sociological Method (New York: Basic Books, 1976).
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith ( New York: Macmillan, 1958 ).
Piaget touches on this issue in a number of different works. See particularly The Child’s Conception of the World (Paterson, N.J.: Littlefield, Adams, 1960 ).
This is another issue which has been dealt with by many persons. See particularly Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interest ( Boston: Beacon Press, 1972 ).
For what is still the best non-mathematical discussion of quantification see Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel,ed. and trans. by Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950, 1964) pp. 87–177.
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Smith, C.W. (1989). The Qualitative Significance of Quantitative Representation. In: Glassner, B., Moreno, J.D. (eds) The Qualitative-Quantitative Distinction in the Social Sciences. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 112. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3444-8_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3444-8_3
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