1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910524850303321

Autore

Rosenberg Alexander <1946->

Titolo

Sociobiology and the Preemption of Social Science / Alexander Rosenberg

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Johns Hopkins University Press

ISBN

1-4214-3542-X

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (1 online resource (xi, 227 pag)

Disciplina

306/.4

Soggetti

Philosophie sociale

Sociologie et biologie

Sociobiologie

Sociale wetenschappen

Sociobiology

Social sciences - Philosophy

Sciences sociales - Philosophie

Sociologie

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

Open access edition supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (pages 219-221) and index.

Sommario/riassunto

Why have the social sciences in general failed to produce results with the ever-increasing explanatory power and predictive strength of the natural sciences? In seeking an answer to this question, Alexander Rosenberg, a philosopher of science, plunges into the controversial discipline of sociobiology. Sociobiology, Rosenberg asserts, deals in those forces governing human behavior that traditional social science has unsuccessfully attempted to slip between: neurophysiology, on the one hand, and selective forces, on the other. Unlike previous works in the two fields it straddles, Rosenberg's book brings thinking about the nature of scientific theorizing to bear on the most traditional issues in



the philosophy of social science. The author finds that the subjects of conventional social science do not reflect the operation of laws that social scientists are equipped to discover. The author argues that much of the debate surrounding sociobiology is irrelevant to the issue of its ultimate success. Although largely conceptual, the book is an unequivocal defense of this new theory in the explanation of human behavior.