5 Complexity, Philosophy, and Social Theory
The Natural Sciences and the Human Sciences
In the 1930s, the American sociologist Herbert Blumer described two contrasting orientations in the methodological debate between social researchers in the United States, one being the stimulus–response approach and the other interactionism (Blumer, 1937). Researchers following the stimulus–response direction argued that the social sciences should favour objective data for quantitative analysis, like the psychological experimentation of instrumental behaviourism (Watson, 1913; Pavlov, 1927), with its clear basis in mechanistic natural science.
By contrast, researchers in the interactionist camp identified their basic ...
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