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Making Social Science Matter
Flyvbjerg's 2001 methodological manifesto arguing that the social sciences' century-long attempt to produce episteme about human affairs has failed, and that phronesis — Aristotelian practical wisdom — is the form of knowledge best suited to the phenomena they study.
Making Social Science Matter, subtitled Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again, is Flyvbjerg's fullest statement of the philosophical framework that underlies his entire research program. Published by Cambridge University Press in 2001, the book mounts a sustained argument that the social sciences' aspiration to produce context-independent, law-like findings about human behavior — the aspiration inherited from the natural sciences since Comte — is structurally misconceived. Human affairs are constitutively context-dependent; the phenomena social scientists study do not exhibit the regularities that would make epistemic knowledge possible. The dominant methodology produces findings that are universally true and practically useless, while the form of knowledge that actually matters for consequential human decision-making is systematically excluded from the research paradigm.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book draws on Hubert Dreyfus's critique of artificial intelligence from the 1970s — a connection that becomes operationally prescient in the AI context two decades
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