Philosophy of science examines “scientific knowledge.” It tries to illuminate the specific characteristics of science, the way it is produced, the historical dimensions of science, and the normative criteria at play in appraising science. The discussions mostly take place with reference to the natural sciences, which are still at the core of the philosophy of science as a discipline. The examples used are often taken from one of the natural sciences (usually physics); and it is characteristic that the training of most contemporary philosophers of science has been – at least partly – in one of the natural sciences. The philosophy of the social sciences, on the other hand, traditionally deals with such problems as the role of understanding (Verstehen) in apprehending social phenomena, the status of rational choice theory, the role of experiments in the social sciences, the logical status of game theory, as well as whether there are genuine laws of social phenomena or rather social mechanisms to be discovered, the historicity of the social processes, etc.

The aim of this volume is to push the frontiers of the philosophy of the social sciences as a sub-discipline of the philosophy of science by presenting the results of cutting-edge research in the main fields, along with their critical discussion by practicing social scientists. The enterprise is motivated by the view that the philosophy of the social sciences cannot ignore the specific scientific practices according to which scientific work is being conducted in the social sciences and will only be valuable if it evolves in constant interaction with the theoretical developments in the social sciences.