Introductory remarks

Social scientists have always wanted to believe that the social sciences are ‘true’ sciences, just like the natural sciences. However, such a belief has never been fully justified. The social sciences have usually been descriptive rather than explanatory, and if they tried to be explanatory, the explanatory theories they provided either had a low predictive power or, if they had a high predictive power, predictions generated by these theories rarely passed empirical tests entirely satisfactorily. As a result, the social sciences possess few (if any) theories which can match natural sciences theories in terms of empirical corroboration and universal acceptance. Arguably, this mainly descriptive character of the social sciences has been due to the fact that social scientists have not had at their disposal a solid view of human nature. What is worse, many social scientists have believed that in order to work out such a view, no recourse to the natural sciences is needed. This belief is pernicious for the social sciences: arguably, the social sciences will never reach the status of ‘true’ sciences if they do not become open to developments in the natural (especially, biological) sciences – the only sciences which can provide a solid view of human nature. It should be observed, though, that this belief (which may be dubbed ‘scepticism towards usefulness of biology in the social sciences’ or, less politely, ‘biophobia’) was to some extent justified in the past when the biological sciences did not have very much interesting to say about human beings as social actors.