Misurazione, esperimenti, leggi: il sillogismo scientista

Abstract

In the first part of the essay the author states that the astounding progress in physics and the natural sciences has determined an inferiority complex in social scientists, with a consequent desire to enjoy a similar measure of prestige, honours, resources, and power. That desire acted as the major premise of a sort of practical syllogism (in Von Wright’s sense) whose minor premise was the conviction that experiments, measurement, and the search for laws were the pillars of the natural sciences’ success.The consequence was the imperative to follow the same path, i. e. experimenting, measuring, and looking for laws, while totally disregarding the nature of the objects of social sciences, which hardly if ever allow for bona fide experiments or measurements, and thoroughly exclude the presence of laws, i. e. of controllable and confirmable propositions concerning men, cultures, and societies all over the planet, and from the most remote past to the most distant future.After quoting vast evidence as to the presence of that syllogism in the minds of social scientists from the Enlightenment on, the author shows how, in order to conceal the absence of bona fide laws, experiments and measurement, social scientists have resorted to a lavish (ab)use of such terms as a sort of fetishes or (self-)make believes.In the second part of the essay the author supplies vast evidence of the semantic dispersion suffered by the three terms that have been used as a sort of talisman in order to pretend having passed the sacred threshold of science.In the conclusion, the author suggests to follow a radically alternative path in order to reach a status of dignity and self respect, i. e. to develop an epistemology that should adopt as a starting point the difference of social science’s objects from physics’, rather than trying to conceal it by terminological tricks.