How the Social Sciences Think about the World's Social: Outline of a Critique (Beyond the Social Sciences Book 2)

At the beginning of the new millennium, the social sciences discover an epochal “turn” making it necessary to revolutionize their theory-building: As a response to what they call the globalization of the social, they find the need to globalize their theorizing as well. It is odd to discover after two centuries of colonialism and imperialism, after two world wars and several economic world crises that there is a world beyond the national socials; it is even more strange that the social sciences globalize their theorizing by comparing theories about nationally confined socials and by creating all sorts of, preferably, “local theories”, just as if any national social was a secluded social biotope. Discussing how to globalize the social sciences, they argue that globalizing social science theorizing means finding a way of theorizing that must, above all, be liberated from “scientism” in order to allow a “provincialization” of thinking. Not surprisingly, the globalizing social sciences also rediscover mythological and moral thinking as a means for a “true scientific universalism”. Michael Kuhn's new book presents many thought-provoking arguments on the oddities of the globalizing social sciences and on how these oddities are not accidents, but a consequence of the nature of how the social sciences theorize about the social.

At the beginning of the new millennium, the social sciences took an epochal 'turn' that revolutionized their theory-building. As a response to what they called the globalization of the social, they found the need to globalize their theorizing as well. It is curious that only after two centuries of colonialism and imperialism, after two world wars and several economic world crises, did they discover that there is a world beyond the national socials; it is even more strange that the social sciences globalize their theorizing by comparing theories about nationally confined socials and by creating all sorts of 'local' theories, as if any national social was a secluded social biotope. Trying to globalize the social sciences, they argue that globalizing social science theorizing means finding a way of theorizing that must, above all, be liberated from 'scientism' in order to allow a 'provincialization' of thinking. Not surprisingly, the globalizing social sciences have also rediscovered mythological and moral thinking as a means for a true scientific universalism. Michael Kuhn argues that the oddities of the globalizing social sciences are not accidents, but a consequence of the nature of how the social sciences theorize about the social.

Why a theory about social sciences? -- Chapter A: The world's social in social science thinking -- Chapter B: Categorical essentials of disciplinary thinking -- Chapter C: The social science approach to scientific thinking-advancements of teleological theorizing -- Chapter D: The discourse about and the progress of social science knowledge -- Chapter E: Going beyond the social sciences.