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'Science' in the Social Sciences
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Two works of lasting influence on the theory and practice of the social sciences were Emile Durkheim’s Suicide (1897) and G. Yule’s An Introduction to the Theory of Statistics (1911). Both advanced the thesis that statistical data can be used to identify the causes of socially distributed phenomena. In the middle of the twentieth century, however, several philosophers began to question what had by then become orthodox in social-scientific methodology. In this section, we shall examine some of their arguments and attempt to locate the areas of interest in which they were, and remain, pertinent, and to isolate areas of inquiry where the ‘orthodoxy’ can be insulated against some of their criticisms.