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Methodology of the Social Sciences

Abstract

PROF. F. KAUFMANN, formerly of Vienna and now at the New School of Social Research in New York, has long been concerned with problems of methodology. Here he attacks the most difficult of them, the methodology of the social sciences, though only in the second and shorter half of the book. In the first half he surveys the general problems of scientific method, because of his belief that its chief issues are broadly identical in the natural and the social sciences, the difference between them being merely one of degree. In the contrast between deductive reasoning and empirical procedure, around which he weaves his main argument, the author sees the key to "the solution of many apparently unrelated problems in natural and social science".

Methodology of the Social Sciences

By Prof. Felix Kaufmann. Pp. ix + 272. (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1944.) 20s. net.

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MITRANY, D. Methodology of the Social Sciences. Nature 156, 278–279 (1945). https://doi.org/10.1038/156278a0

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