For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the challenges of doing social science.
Many academics are initially drawn to the social sciences from a desire to make the world a better place. They assume that these fields can improve our lives by providing deeper insights into human flourishing, morality, and the nature of freedom — only to discover that their field has worked itself into certain rigid theoretical postures that leave it with surprisingly little to say about these important concepts.
“For a very long time, the social sciences have flip-flopped between two extremes,” says noted sociologist and co-director of Yale’s Center for Comparative Research, Philip Gorski. “One extreme regards social science as precisely equivalent to the natural sciences in its aims and methods.” This approach, according to Gorski, winds up adopting scientific methods of inquiry that can distort our understanding of humanity by treating humans and culture reductionistically.