Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Understanding and Being

Titel: Understanding and Being

Stichwort: Das Problem der Sozialwissenschaften

Kurzinhalt: Social Science; Unterschied zw. Der Erforschung eines Dinges oder Menschen; bei Ausschluss der Freiheit Rechtfertigung von Propaganda und psychologische konditionierung

Textausschnitt: I think so. The problem is that where your object is an empirically, intelligently, rationally conscious subject that develops in his intelligence and reasonableness, you're dealing with an entity that, even from the viewpoint of your scientific method, has to be approached in a manner essentially different from the study of atoms or plants or animals. And it's only insofar as the human sciences will be willing to expect some philosophic commitments or, on the other hand, be masters of all possible philosophic commitments that they'll be able to think on a level that is truly human in their human sciences.
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But if he thinks of economic activity as predictable events in the same manner as the nineteenth-century physicists did, or as statistically probable events, he's dealing with an objective manifold, and his only way of dealing it will be through government, or through propaganda, or through psychological conditioning, or through the police state, or what you please. The link between the human science and its application will not be human; it will be subhuman. It's a problem of considerable dimensions - a number of dimensions that are all pretty enormous.