The vocation of social sciences in a world of unreason

Abstract

In this essay we try to deal with what many authors consider to be the “crisis” of the social sciences. Whether for endogenous reasons (hyper-specialization and fragmentation) or external movements (Studies, “post” trends, “turns”), there are undeniable and growing cracks in the soil of our basic epistemological consensus. Some propose a platform capable of housing a plurality of theories, while others seek a substantive theory supposedly capable of reunifying the social sciences, especially sociology, and still others seek to recover basic thematic and empirical axes. None of these answers, however, seem to be able to tackle the importance of the issue at its root, which involves the theoretical and epistemological dimensions, but is not reduced to them. And the reason, in our view, is one: it is the very meaning of what we do and who we are that is itself in question. Our proposal is to tackle this challenge in a way that, in our opinion, has not been addressed in all its radicalness so far, in the proper sense of starting from its roots. Our perspective is that of a social scientist who sets out to reflect on his own presuppositions and who encourages his epistemic community, as a community of life, to recover its self-understanding. The essay format seems to us to be the way in which we can achieve the search for the meaning of what we are and what we do in the most vigorous way and in all its implications.

Keywords: Social sciences. Crisis. Fragmentation. Loss of meaning. epistemological community of life.