In considering the suggestion that anthropology may be seen as a natural science of society, we should remember that the natural sciences proper are no longer what they were in their nineteenth-century heyday. The natural sciences in this sense (positivist, empiricist, numerical) began to break down with the radical changes within the physical sciences at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (special and general relativity and quantum theory in particular). As I mentioned in chapter 1, similar changes are now becoming apparent within other natural sciences. These are not merely changes in ‘paradigm’, but, increasingly, changes in what scientists do and in how they understand what they are doing.

It is primarily because of these changes that the natural sciences have undergone since the days of Wilhelm Dilthey and Max Weber that it now makes more sense to talk of a unity of method between natural and social science than to maintain the traditional opposition between Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften. To consider some of the implications of the status of a natural science today we can turn to the academic discipline that has attempted to understand science as an enterprise: the philosophy of science.

The philosophy of science, as is well known, has itself undergone a major conceptual revolution over the last thirty or so years, as a result of the need to make philosophical sense of the implications of the transformations within physics in particular.