Spanish Abstract / Resumen . Suele creerse que las ciencias sociales son ajenas a la filosofía. Aquí se pretende refutar esta opinión. En efecto, se exhiben contraejemplos de tres tipos: conceptos, principios y problemas que pertenecen tanto a las ciencias sociales como a la filosofía. Estos contraejemplos muestran que la famosa cuestión de la demarcación entre ciencia y filosofía, que ocupara tanto a los filósofos positivistas (de Comte a Carnap) como a Popper, es un pseudoproblema. Siendo así, incumbe al filósofo desenterrar y analizar los componentes filosóficos de la ciencia, para tornarlos precisos y evaluarlos explícitamente.

Science and philosophy were hardly distinguishable until the Romantic period. Then they became estranged but they never really split. In fact science and philosophy share a number of extremely general key concepts, principles, and even problems. Hence, far from being disjoint, they overlap partially. To prove this claim we shall exhibit random samples of each category of ideas.

To begin with, consider the following statements, disregarding their truth value and noting only their constitutive concepts. In fact, an analysis of their negations would yield the same conclusion.

1. All societies are concrete systems composed of living beings (rather than, say, either mere agglomerations of individuals or sets of beliefs, values and norms).

2. Some social systems (e.g., families and circles of friends) are natural, whereas others (e.g., business firms and schools) are artificial.

3. All social systems are located in space and evolve over time.

4. Agency and structure interact: there is neither individual action in an institutional vacuum nor social structure without individual social behavior.

5. Every type of society is characterized by, among other things, its own value system and its own system of moral and legal norms.

6. Society can, nay ought to, be studied in a scientific manner, though not as if it were a natural object, for it is largely artifactual, and people have feelings and thoughts.

7. The findings of the scientific study of society are items of testable knowledge about social systems (rather than, say, speculations about individual behavior).

8. Description is necessary but insufficient: We should attempt to explain data and, whenever possible, to predict them as well.

9. Programmatic hypotheses, of the form "Variable y depends upon variable x ", as well as statistical correlations, are necessary but insufficient: We should strive to conjecture causal, probabilistic and mixed mechanisms.

10. Some rational choice models involve fuzzy concepts of utility or of rationality, and all of them include the controversial hypothesis of maximizing behavior.

It is not hard to identify the philosophical components in the above list. The universal concepts "all" and "some", as well as "and" (or the comma) and "or", are studied in logic; so is "are". And logic is of course a part of philosophy as well as of mathematics. The concepts "about" (or "refers to") and "fuzzy" (or "inexact") belong in semantics, a next-door neighbor of logic. The concepts of matter, process, nature, space, time, system, history, society, and artifact, are extremely general: they are not the exclusive property of any special science, and they are analyzed and systematized in ontology (or metaphysics), one of the oldest branches of philosophy. The concepts of knowledge, science, model, and testability, belong in epistemology (the theory of knowledge), another branch of philosophy. (Each of the words 'rationality' and 'utility' designate different concepts, some of which are philosophical.) Finally, the concepts of value and norm are studied in value theory and moral philosophy. We have thus proved the thesis that philosophy and science, in particular social science, share some concepts.

We shall next prove that social science and philosophy share some principles. Any of the following will do, and so will their denials.

1. Social facts are objective and can be known, albeit only partially and gradually.

2. Ordinary experience (including intuition and empathy) is necessary but insufficient to understand complex systems such as societies: We also need systematic observation, calculation, and theory.

3. Observation should be guided by theory, and in turn theory should be tested by data.

4. Social science is in need of theories of various ranges: "grand" or maximum range theories, middle range, and narrow range theories--or philosophical, general, and specific theories respectively.

5. The empirical tests of hypotheses in social science are tests for truth, whereas the tests of social policies are tests for fairness and efficiency.

6. The truths about social facts and policies are often only approximate, but they can be improved through further research.

7. To explain a social fact is to disclose its plausible mechanisms.

8. Social science makes use of some biology and psychology but is irreducible to either.

9. The frontiers among the social sciences are artificial and shifting.

10. It is morally wrong to make up data or to publish incomprehensible texts.

These propositions and their denials are philosophico-scientific because (a) they belong in the philosophy (or metatheory) of social science and (b) they are supposed to be observed (or violated) by social scientists.

Finally, let us list a few problems that, for being extremely general and for concerning either society or social studies, are philosophical as well as scientific. Moreover, all of them are currently the object of spirited controversies.

1. Are social facts out there, or are they all constructions of the observer or of the community of social students? (This is part of the ontological and epistemological problem of realism.)

2. Are there objective social patterns (laws), or are social facts utterly lawless? (This is part of the ontological problem of lawfulness and the epistemological problem of distinguishing objective patterns from the statements intending to represent them.)

3. What is society: an amorphous collection of individuals, an unanalyzable block, or a system? (This is the individualism-holism-systemism trilemma, an ontological problem with an epistemological counterpart.)

4. How do societies change: under the action of external forces, by their internal dynamics, or both-- and as a result of ideas, material factors, or both? (This is part of the philosophy of history.)

5. What prevails in society: solidarity (cooperation) or conflict (competition)--or rather a combination of the two? (This problem is relevant to moral and political philosophy.)

6. Are people totally free to act or are they the pawns of historical forces--or neither? (This is part of the ontological and ethical problem of free will.)

7. Are the social sciences idiographic (limited to particulars), nomothetic (seeking or using laws), or both? (This is a central problem in the epistemology and methodology of social science.)

8. Do social science theories represent social facts in a literal manner, or are they mere metaphors? (This is a member of the class of semantic and epistemological problems concerning the fact-idea relations.)

9. What impacts, positive, nil or negative, have the various philosophical schools--such as empiricism and idealism--had on social studies? (This is part of the task of identifying and evaluating the philosophies underlying the various schools in social studies.)

10. Are the basic social sciences value-free and morally neutral? And how about the social policy sciences? (These problems belong in the ethics of science and technology.)

These problems are situated at the intersection of social science and philosophy. Hence they must be tackled with the help of tools and findings of the two research fields.

We have thus proved the claim that there is some philosophy in social science. In other words, science and philosophy have a non empty intersection. Hence there is no frontier between them. Consequently the search for a criterion of demarcation between science and philosophy, which has occupied many philosophers, among them the positivist Rudolf Carnap and the rationalist Karl Popper, is vain. And if such search is vain, we may suspect that it originates in seriously mistaken conceptions of both science and philosophy. This is one of the reasons that we must find our own way, doing our best to observe the canons of rationality while at the same time keeping in touch with reality and its scientific exploration.

(*): Taken from the author's book "Finding Philosophy in Social Science", to be published in September by Yale University Press, P.O. Box 20940, New Haven, CT 06520-9040, USA (http://www.yale.edu/yup/).