In this paper, I will discuss two prominent views on the relevance and irrelevance of ontological investigations for the social sciences respectively, namely ontological foundationalism and antiontological pragmatism. I will argue that both views are unsatisfactory. The subsequent part of the paper will introduce an alternative role for ontological projects in the philosophy of the social sciences that fares better in this respect by paying attention to the ontological assumptions of actual social scientific theories, models and related explanatory practices. I will illustrate and support this alternative through discussion of three concrete cases.
KeywordsSocial ontology, explanation, philosophy of science in practice, pragmatism, ontological foundationalism To appear in Philosophy of the Social Sciences | Revised draft, 2016-05-25 -please do not cite! 2
This paper uses the example of the COVID-19 pandemic to analyse the danger associated with insufficient epistemic pluralism in evidence-based public health policy. Drawing on certain elements in Paul Feyerabend’s political philosophy of science, it discusses reasons for implementing more pluralism as well as challenges to be tackled on the way forward.
In this paper, we use the case of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe to address the question of what kind of knowledge we should incorporate into public health policy. We show that policy-making during the COVID-19 pandemic has been biomedicine-centric in that its evidential basis marginalised input from non-biomedical disciplines. We then argue that in particular the social sciences could contribute essential expertise and evidence to public health policy in times of biomedical emergencies and that we should thus strive for a tighter integration of the social sciences in future evidence-based policy-making. This demand faces challenges on different levels, which we identify and discuss as potential inhibitors for a more pluralistic evidential basis.
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